A/N: Crossover inspired by a Tumblr friend. This fic assumes several things: one, that in the time that Kate was hiding from Neal and he was trying to catch her attention with bigger cons, he went to Europe sometimes, and two, they were broken up, such that he could rekindle his on-again, off-again liaison with Bela.
They meet first in New York, where all such things begin. He is still very young and does not know how to wear a suit. She is still very young, but she knows she's made a deal with the devil and so nothing matters but what she can get.
They are both too pretty for their own good. They drink coffee out of paper cups in the winter, huddled on doorsteps, scheming and dreaming and picking pockets.
"Someday," she tells him, "We'll steal a Da Vinci." It's a pipedream. Their hands are shaking with cold, they are wearing second-hand coats. But it makes them smile, how boldly and bravely they can lie.
She is sixteen, he is twenty-one. Bela falls in love for the first and last time in a life she already knows will be very short, but for now, she keeps the secret.
...
Five years later, Bela is in Nice, in Vienna, in Windsor Castle because that irony amuses her. Neal Caffrey has a talent that makes the criminal world go round, and Bela is a thief with nothing to lose and no one who can take it from her before her time is up. They match smiles, match wits, and so they match each other.
They drink champagne from crystal glasses, and case the room from separate corners as though they do not remember each other.
In Nice, she snatches a Bernini bust from under his very nose, and laughs all the way to her meet with the buyer. She does not need the boy from New York anymore.
Then she finds a dozen roses cast in bronze, heavy and opulent and insulting—heavy enough to fool her, filling the space of the missing bust.
She hates Neal Caffrey all the way to their next meeting, when she cheats him of ten thousand dollars worth of Japanese bonds.
He doesn't hate her, because he's a sportsman, and so she laughs away her anger and her triumph, and leaves lipstick stains along the line of his jaw.
...
She hears the news of his arrest. Business-wise, it means little to her. She has shifted markets; there is more money to be made in the acquisition of objects that are heavy with secrets and charms.
But Neal—Bela stares out her high-rise windows at whatever shimmering city she's in that month, and tries not remember how his arms felt around her. She used to believe that she could see him in the mirror, that same cocky smile, that same quicksilver charm.
But he is better than she will ever be, caged or free. Bela Talbot's a piece of work, pretty on the outside and a lot of broken bits within, but at least she can be honest with herself.
Neal Caffrey goes to prison. Bela Talbot is going to hell.
...
Dean Winchester in a tuxedo makes her swoon because she's human. But she wants Neal on her other arm, because Neal would know better than to chew gum, and Neal would have the Hand of Glory in his pocket before they'd even circled the room.
Nostalgia and present passions, however fleeting, make her smile that evening. She has diamonds on her neck and the hands of a thief are hands of glory, so all of this seems right.
She screws the Winchesters over, time and again. It's what she does, and they hate her for it.
The bronze-cast roses in her closet, still in the box that should have held the Bernini, remind her that he would have understood.
But then, Neal Caffrey's presence in her life has always had a deceptive weight.
...
Neal gets a postcard with two phone numbers on it three months after he starts his deal with Peter. It's been passed around, not mailed—it was sent by someone to someone to someone else, who would know where to find him.
She signed it, Da Vinci, and left two phone numbers.
Neal goes white to the lips, because Bela has never asked him for help. She'd die first. She'd die.
He dials the first of the numbers.
The voice on the other end is rough and masculine. "Yeah?"
"Dean Winchester?" Neal asks. "I need your help."
...
"Gorgeous car," Neal says, with a winning smile, but he knows it won't do much good. He's got his hands tucked in the fine-woven, silk-lined pocks of a Devore suit, and the inscrutable men in front of him are wearing frayed plaid and disreputable jeans.
It seems strange to imagine how Bela even knew them. The girl on the New York stoop with a paper cup in her hands seems irretrievably far away.
"Thanks," says the shorter one. Dean. He seems to be in charge, or at least to want it that way. "Who are you looking for?"
"Bela Talbot," Neal answers. He wishes there was a way to accomplish this more neatly—not going in mostly blind, the way he is—but even Mozzie was vague about the doings of these two men. Vigilantes of some sort, modern cowboys who run with a very different crowd than Neal knows.
The faces before him don't look particularly pleased. The taller one says, "You knew Bela?"
The past tense is all Neal needs to know.
They confer. They're brothers; Neal can tell not just from faint resemblances, but from the synchronized movements, the inside references. Then Dean says, "Bela's dead." It's hard to tell if he's unsympathetic or tired or both.
Neal clears his throat. She was an almost, a maybe. More elusive than Alex, more withdrawn than Kate. And yet—"She thought there was something you could do." And maybe it's the Caffrey charm—maybe—but if Neal's being honest (which he rarely is) it's more likely the way he's crumpling his hat in his hands, the way he doesn't give a damn about charm at the moment. Whatever it is, the Winchesters relent, and tell him their story.
...
There's pieces missing, that much is clear. Everyone has their own apocalypses to attend to; they don't all need to be shared with strangers.
And Neal is far from naïve, but he believes their fantastical yarn enough to hang around. He's—open-minded, and he remembers that, when last they met, Bela was taking…new directions.
That, and he's been Mozzie's friend for long enough to know that not everything is what it seems.
So they can call it hell if they want to, a deal with the devil if they want to—Neal doesn't care. He just has to know, he has to, because Kate went down in fire and he still smells brimstone when he wakes at night.
Hell is many things, and sometimes it's on earth.
"What does it take to get her back?" he asks. "What will it cost me?"
Dean's face goes gray. "You can't get her back," he says. "It's a higher paygrade."
If there weren't two of them, Neal might do something stupid, grab Dean by the collar and try to shake it out of him. (He would fail, almost certainly.) "You've been there," he observes.
"I have."
"So it's possible to come back."
Dean's eyes shift away. His brother leans in a little closer, protective. "Not for her."
...
Neal is, by most accounts, out of options. Neal goes to the Crossroads, digs with his fingers in the dirt. Stands up and brushes gravel from his knees, and wonders if Bela expected anyone to come for her.
He turns to face Curtis Hagan.
"Caffrey," Hagan drawls, eyes blearing red. "I'm not surprised."
Neal shrugs, because, really, who else? "Neither am I."
...
Bela stirs. The pits are very deep, and the pain is not just around her but in her, forever and ever, because the girl on the rusted swingset was afraid.
She is done screaming; her voice is gone. She twists and turns and floats to the surface, drawn by some force that seems to come from outside. She wonders if this is how Dean Winchester felt when the angel came to save him.
But who would save her?
Through the mist, the haze of the veil that separates earth from what is under the earth, she sees a man at the crossroads. He has learned how to wear a suit. Bela would scream if she still could. They have cut out her heart again and again, split it open to its very chambers.
But it is still hers.
The veil is impenetrable. She has been drawn up to the edge, but her tattered feet sting as she comes too close to what is of earth. A thousand hissing voices call her back to the depths. She fights, while she still can, and listens.
There is a contract hanging from the demon's long fingers.
Neal has a pen in his hand.
...
"What do I have to do?" Neal's jaw is set. He is never calmer than when his life is on the line. Two lines; roads that mark an X. He is within his radius. Somewhere, Peter is calmly reading his evening paper, unaware that Neal is taking going to the dark side more literally than anyone ever imagined.
Peter might as well be in another world. Perhaps he is.
Hagan's fiery eyes gleam, and his fingers trace the lines of writing. "You're clever, Caffrey, but you won't get out of this one. Your signature frees the girl—but mine's the one that binds your soul. So if you think that even for a moment, you can get away with the better half of the bargain—there's nothing you can do to stop me signing this, unless you want to tear it up and let the girl burn. She's been baking for what feels like centuries, to her."
Somewhere, Mona Lisa smiles. Here, though, the lies are all that Neal Caffrey has.
"I'll sign," he drawls, and reaches for the contract.
...
Bela's breath catches in her dead throat. All she can do is watch his hands, watch the elegant swirl of his signature crawl across the page, a warrant for his death.
Neal Caffrey made it out of prison, and now he is going to hell.
(But.)
Bela is a thief. Bela sees the curve of his fingers—there is something hidden in his hand. She cannot see it. He presses it for the fraction of a second against the paper, and hands it back to the demon with a lazy flourish.
"All yours."
...
Hagan is grinning, a sickly light sneaking through the gaps between his teeth, from the corners of his eyes. Neal tucks his hands back in his pockets, and waits.
Hagan lowers his pen to the paper, and then he howls.
There is nothing to see. The devil's trap, stamped over the place where Hagan would mark his fatal signature, is in invisible ink.
Neal didn't use his charm on the Winchesters. But now, there is no reason to hold it back.
Slowly, surely, he lets smile slip over his face. His signature smile, if anyone's tallying points for irony.
"You bloody cheated," Hagan snarls. He moves forward, snakelike, but is thrown back just before he reaches Neal. There's another devil's trap, constructed out of thin metal sheeting, concealed artfully under the dirt. It had taken Moz only an afternoon of welding.
"I'm thorough," Neal says, almost apologetically. He'll really have to send a gift basket to the Winchesters. If they like that sort of thing. "And you're a man of business. Now, from my dabbles in the law, I believe the executed portion of a contract is still enforceable. If, of course, it's signed by the party to be charged—" he twirls a finger towards the pertinent portion—"which, in this case, is me."
"I will drag your entrails out one by one," Hagan begins, but Neal holds up a hand.
"Not at the moment," Neal returns, lightly. "At the moment, we have a deal."
...
Something is happening. The ground cools and solidifies beneath Bela's feet; the haze is clearing. The air shifts around her—no not, a shift, but the return of oxygen to her lungs. She falls. She sleeps.
It is nothing like death. She would know.
...
Bela wakes in a hospital bed, with a dozen real roses left by the bedside, and Neal Caffrey sleeping in the chair beside her with a hat over his face. She is almost too weary to pick his pocket.
Almost.
His fingers close around her wrist as she draws back, but he does not move otherwise.
Then, from beneath the hat, he says, very mildly, "You'd think coming back from hell would reform a person."
Bela laughs for the first time in centuries. Everything hurts, but she is whole. As whole as she has ever been; she is sure that inside, the broken bits are further shattered.
There are not words. There are not words for the Winchesters, whose help she never deserved. There are not words for hell, for burning flesh and burning souls. And there are not words for the man beside her, who conned the devil—for her.
It doesn't feel like a victory. It feels like much, much more than that.
When she says, "Thank you," it is hoarse and rough, and she is afraid that they did not give her back her voice after all.
But Neal does not seem to care. Neal puts his hat on the table beside her bed, and reaches for her hand.
"Now," he says. "What about that Da Vinci?"
It makes her smile, how boldly and bravely he lives.