~ ~ ~
A lot of things happened to Dean Winchester while he was in Hell.
By ‘a lot of things’ we mean ‘a lot of nasty, horrible, unrepeatable things’; the kind of things Dean would never, ever tell Sam, no matter how intense a moment of brotherly bonding they were having, or how much Dean wanted to confess to make himself feel better, because confession was supposedly good for the soul. Except, as you know – and as he knows, too, after Sam’s reaction – confession’s not really good for the soul at all. Nothing’s good for the soul except a life lived cleanly and a death from natural causes that comes free from regret or worry, and that’s a feat as rare as hen’s teeth on this planet with its six billion dirty-souled citizens.
Dean’s soul is very dirty, and there are plenty of reasons why, but the biggest stain on the poor, ragged mess of it was formed in Hell.
Out of all the things that happened to Dean as he suffered the tortures of damnation – the ripping, the tearing, the bleeding, the screaming, the sobbing, the begging, the dismembering, the stabbing, the burning, the shredding, the unravelling and the reforming – there’s just one thing that Dean doesn’t remember. It’s something so tamped down, shoved so deep into the back of his mind, so wrapped up in shame and fear and self-pity and loathing, that even if it fell out of the back of his head and landed mewling on the floor, he still wouldn’t recognize what it was when he stooped to pick it up.
Its name is Alastair.
To be more precise, its name is Alastair and Dean.
Dean doesn’t remember it, but his soul does.
~ ~ ~
Dean Winchester opens his eyes behind the wheel of his car and realizes he has absolutely no clue how he got there.
His memories aren’t so much fuzzy as they’re filled with hellfire and screaming, he’s soaked through with sweat as though he’s just run a marathon in his dad’s battered leather jacket, he’s sitting bolt upright in the seat and the engine’s ticking itself cool beyond the windscreen and he has no fucking idea where he is.
He rubs a hand over his face, fingers sliding on sweat, and for some reason looks at his watch, which is pretty pointless because even though he sees it’s three o’clock he can’t remember what time it was the last time he looked. If you’d asked him the date, he’d have told you to buy a calendar and then stalked away with a sick feeling in his gut because he wouldn’t have had a clue.
He looks around him: he’s sitting at the side of a highway – Highway 71, according to a sign that’s rather handily looming on the horizon – and it’s raining, a bitter, miserable, bleak rain that makes the afternoon seem like early evening. Cars swoosh by him and they might as well be boats because of all the puddles they’re splashing through, metal ships journeying down a river made from asphalt and decorated with white and yellow lines that go on forever.
Dean takes it all in, understands that he doesn’t recognize a goddamn thing, and does what he always does when he finds himself lost and alone: calls his brother.
“Jesus Christ, Dean! Where the hell have you been? I was worried sick!”
The voice in his ear is strained and pissed, not to mention loud, and it makes Dean wince. “Have... I been gone a while?” he says, uncertainly.
“What, were you drinking? Are you drunk? It’s been a whole day, Dean – what the hell’s gotten into you? Are you okay?”
Dean samples the saliva in his throat and throws that explanation out of the window. “I wasn’t drinking, Sammy. I don’t know... I got no idea what’s happened. Where I am. I just woke up here and... Sam, I don’t know what happened.”
There’s a silence, then Sam says urgently, “Dean, you might have been possessed. Check your tattoo. Is it broken? Is the ward broken in any way, like a cut or something? Can you see or smell any sulfur?”
He’s going too fast, his voice businesslike but tight with tension, and Dean can’t keep up. He hears screaming in his ears and remembers Hell and fuck, Sam’s right, he must’ve been possessed. He pulls down his t-shirt and inspects his tattoo, but it’s fine, untouched; nothing’s changed, there’s no way anything could’ve snuck past the charm and inside him. He looks around him, mystified, and the car looks ordinary. Safe. Nothing sulfurous or demonic at all. He even smells his clothes, but they smell of Tide and aftershave, the way they always smell, and he doesn’t know whether to be relieved or not.
“I don’t think I was possessed,” he says. “I mean, if I was, it got in despite the ward. I’m fine, everything seems fine, I just... don’t remember.”
“Where are you?”
“Highway 71. Uh, hang on, let’s see... There’s a sign up ahead for the I35 exit.”
“Wait... hang on, I’m checking the map... God, Dean, that’s 250 miles from here.”
“It is?”
“How do you feel? Are you okay?”
Dean closes his eyes, shutting out the rain and the gray skies, but all he can see is Hell, the chains and the hooks and the blades and the bloody, bloody victims on the rack. He opens them again.
“Yeah,” he says. “I feel fine. I’ll drive back. Wait for me at the motel.”
He shuts his cell before Sam can speak, and he stares at his hands on the steering wheel for a long time before he starts the engine.
They look red, somehow. Glistening.
~ ~ ~
When Dean Winchester was in Hell, he had to make some very interesting choices.
Some of those choices were rather run-of-the-mill for Hell: for example, whether to choke to death quickly on his own blood, or to keep coughing and struggling long enough to call his torturer yet another foul name. Or whether to scream for his brother or his father or, on a very bad day, his mother.
Like we said, run of the mill.
Other choices, however, weren’t. The thing about Hell is this: everybody hates each other. There’s no feeling of camaraderie, the sense that everybody is in it together, that you should keep your spirits up so that the soul being eviscerated on the rack across from you feels heartened and therefore fights harder to stay sane and whole. Because ‘sane and whole’ isn’t really the point of Hell: the point of Hell is to flay your soul to such a point that you become the creature flaying you. There’s a kind of circular logic to it that’s almost pleasing, if you like that kind of thing, although most people don’t.
So everybody hates each other – every lost soul, every broken soul, every soul given the choice to get off the rack, every torturer and demon and minion and wisp of something that was once human but now can’t even say the word; they loathe each other to the very depths of their beings. Which rules out any kind of bonding and, ironically, makes Hell both rather crowded and very, very lonely.
Dean was wretchedly lonely for a long, long time. But then somebody found him, and he had to make a choice.
That somebody was Alastair.
~ ~ ~
Dean gets back to the motel and sleeps like the fucking dead for a whole night and half a day. The next afternoon he gets up and showers and dresses and decides that, all in all, he feels pretty normal.
Sam looks like crap.
“Dude, you look like crap,” Dean tells him, tearing the lid off his Starbucks coffee with all the disdain of a man who doesn’t need no lid to keep his drink in place, thank you very much indeed, Mr Barista.
“I was up all night trying to figure out what happened to you,” Sam returns, somewhat pissily. “Dean, you blacked out. You were gone for 14 hours. If it wasn’t a demon – and I’m still not sure about that – it definitely wasn’t anything good.”
Dean takes a swig of coffee, gets a mouthful of foam and grimaces. It’s easier for him to vent at his venti latte than it is for him to vent at the world, so he curses and puts it down, fighting the urge to throw it across the room.
“I’m okay now,” he says. “Maybe it’ll come back to me. Maybe I was just, I dunno, sleepwalking or something?”
“Yeah, because that’s how life works,” Sam says flatly. “You spend your life hunting demons and all things supernatural and then one day you start sleepwalking harmlessly into your car and driving hundreds of miles. I’m sure it’s nothing more serious than that.”
Dean bites back a snide comment and sits on his bed, rubbing his neck. He’d dreamt of the Pit again, only this time it felt more vivid than his usual dreams, as though he’d had some kind of recent reminder of just how peachy it had been down there in Hell. He wonders, yet again, if he’ll ever be free of the place, and he wonders, yet again, if Sam will ever understand what he went through. He’d said he did, but... well, Sam wasn’t quite the Sam he wanted him to be right now.
“So what did you dig up?” he says, trying not to think about it.
Sam reels off a list of ailments and entities and Dean closes his eyes, hating himself for not being himself.
~ ~ ~
“I’ve heard a lot about you, Dean Winchester,” Alastair had told Dean upon their first meeting, and ordinarily Dean would’ve come back with some smart-aleck reply, except that he was too busy holding back a scream because Alastair had plunged a knife deep into his thigh by way of a memorable ‘hello’. The blade had pierced Dean’s femoral artery and he was bleeding out, litres of blood that would eventually flow up from the floor and back into his body, because it only took a few minutes to die from a femoral wound and Dean wasn’t allowed to die because he’d already done that three years beforehand.
That was another thing about Hell: it made your first death, the one that brought you there, a fond memory. With your first death, you didn’t wake up again.
Not for a while, anyway.
“You were a hunter, weren’t you?” Alastair had asked Dean a short while later, as Dean had shivered and shaken and barely managed to contain a whimper of pain as Alastair worked.
“I k-killed w-worse things than y-you,” he’d stammered in reply, and Alastair had laughed then, long and loud, because the defiance in his victim’s words was everything Alastair lived to hear.
Alastair also lived to break things. He’d lived to break things for longer than any other demon in Hell, or so he said, and he was really rather good at it. So, with this in mind, he’d set about breaking Dean.
And damn, had he taken his own sweet time doing it.
~ ~ ~
Nothing comes of Sam’s research and Dean still can’t remember an entire day of his life. Eventually they do ascertain that he’d stopped to fill up the car at a truck stop along the highway, and, mindful of the fact that they’d tracked the demon riding Sam the same way a few years beforehand, they investigate. Dean stays in the car while Sam poses as a traffic cop to obtain footage from the security cameras, and when he climbs back into the vehicle he tells Dean that the man behind the counter had been beaten with a tire iron wielded by a psycho customer a few days beforehand, so hard that he’d lost consciousness, but nothing had been stolen and nobody could understand the reason behind the attack. He was feeling better now and the concussion had gone, thanks for asking, but he’d know the bastard anywhere if he saw him again.
Dean is both relieved he stayed in the car and horrified that it had probably been him.
The only thing of note about the security footage is the moment when Dean looks right up at the camera and waves, a sly grin shaping his mouth. In every other way, he seems normal as he fills up the tank, and there’s no footage of the attack itself because the cameras are all pointed at the gas pumps.
Dean watches and re-watches the footage, freaked to see himself with no memory of being there, and he wonders how whatever was controlling him had known the camera was watching him and that they’d be watching the tape a few days later.
After two weeks they stop talking about it, although Sam keeps giving his brother contemplative looks as Dean drives, looks Dean tries to ignore because there’s nothing to say; he can’t remember a damn thing, and he feels fine now. Sam keeps staring at him, though, and Dean doesn’t like feeling like his brother’s expecting him to suddenly gonna flip out and go evil or something.
It gives him a little insight into Sam’s world for once.
It’s not a good place to be.
~ ~ ~
Dean made many noises in Hell.
There was the soft, delicate hiss of breath pulled into lungs inside a body that couldn’t quite believe what had just been done to it.
There was the shrill, ear-splitting screech that accompanied sharp, sudden tortures such as nail-pulling or needles, pains inflicted with suddenness and venom that didn’t give the victim much time to vocalize.
There was the begging. Always, there was the begging. Even though he wouldn’t break – for so, so many years, Dean wouldn’t break – he’d still begged, because hey, that’s what you do when a demon is about to stick a corkscrew in your eye.
And above it all there was the screaming. Endless, terrible screaming, a sound that Alastair cherished above all others.
Over an unfathomable amount of time, the wails and cries of his playthings had become Alastair’s food, his sustenance; their pleas for mercy his very life’s blood. But the screaming was something else. The screaming was his sex. The things he did to make his victims scream was foreplay to him; the sound they made was his climax, the culmination of his efforts. He loved to hear people scream, as long as they screamed for him and him alone, and Dean Winchester had a scream that was like nothing else he’d ever heard, not in all of his millennia in Hell or all of his cruel exploits on the surface of the Earth.
Dean’s scream was... lusty.
Oh, Alastair liked that.
~ ~ ~
“Dean? Dean! Come on, man, open your eyes. Dean? Come on, Dean, wake up!”
Sam’s voice is all controlled panic and desperation and Dean can’t resist it, can never resist Sam, and he peels open his eyes and stares up at him in puzzlement.
“What is it?” he mumbles, and something’s not quite right, but he’s not sure what it is.
“Oh thank God,” Sam breathes, his voice cracking, and the expression on his face is such a mixture of horror and relief that Dean snaps to wakefulness in a heartbeat. He’s lying on a wooden floor in a room that looks like it’s part of a ramshackle tenement building; he can see the block across the street through the grimy window and, somehow, remembers that they’re in Detroit. He stares at the ceiling and walls for a few seconds before registering that the walls look weird, and once his brain informs him that weird is actually arterial spray he sits up so quickly that he almost knocks Sam over.
Behind him are two men and a woman, dead.
Not just dead. Ripped to shreds. Their faces are bloody pulps; their insides are now their outsides; their skin has been flayed from their backs and there are dismembered fingers lined up in a neat little row on the window ledge. There’s blood everywhere, not just up the walls and puddling in goopy pools on the floor but all over Dean, too; he’s elbow-deep in it, his jeans are saturated, and he can taste it on his tongue.
He stares at the bodies for as long as he needs to understand what it is that he’s seeing, and then he turns back to his brother. Sam’s face is pale; almost green, as though he’s trying to keep himself from vomiting.
“I d-didn’t do this,” Dean stammers, understanding the look in his brother’s eyes. “I didn’t. I c-couldn’t.” But even as he says it he knows it’s not true, because he could, of course he could, and he has done this before, over and over and over again. He even recognizes some of the cuts and impact marks on the victims as his own. His handiwork. His.
“We need to get you outta here,” Sam says, his voice so low and freaked that Dean can barely register it.
“What happened?” Dean asks him, because he sure as shit can’t remember.
Sam’s keeping his eyes focused on him, ignoring the bodies, and Dean doesn’t blame him. “You walked out on me last night, but I followed you. I didn’t get here in time to stop you... doing...” His voice trails off, and Dean understands then that Sam is barely keeping it together. He wants to believe he’s innocent, but the evidence is too overwhelming.
“I was possessed,” Dean says hurriedly. “I had to be! This wasn’t me, Sam!”
“I know, I know,” says his brother. “Come on, we have to get you away before these guys are missed.”
He pulls Dean to his feet, hand in bloody hand, and Dean’s knees are Jell-O but he still manages to support himself. He looks around, trying to control his shivering – after-effects of the possession, he tells himself, not an adrenaline comedown from all the violence – and sees that the room they’re in is filled with dirty mattresses and cooking utensils that don’t look as they’ve been anywhere near food, just drugs, and the place smells disgusting, even over all the blood. These people were low-lifes, junkies, and the woman might’ve been a hooker from her clothing (what’s left of it), but they’re still dead and they were innocent and he must have killed them.
Vomit rises in his throat and he gags; Sam’s reflexes are quick enough to drag him into the tiny, stinking bathroom so that he can throw up in the toilet. He wonders fleetingly if Sam threw up in there already because the smell’s so bad, but then all he can do is puke.
~ ~ ~
“You know, I’ve never met anybody like you,” Alastair had once told Dean. He’d stopped cutting and smiled, wide and sinister, and Dean had stopped trembling just long enough to spit in his face. Alastair had grinned, licked the spittle from his chin and nodded his thanks.
“How long are you going to keep d-doing this?” Dean had asked him, and his voice had been a mere shadow of everything it had once been. Alastair had taken too much of it. He'd screamed too much for him.
“I will do this for as long as you interest me,” Alastair had said.
Dean had swallowed, his face twisting in pain. “So you’re telling me that if I’m d-dull, you’ll leave me alone?” He’d huffed out a laugh. “Maybe I should t-talk about car engines and d-different grades of rock salt until the end of t-time.”
And that was when Alastair had done something rather unusual. He’d lowered his knife, taken a step forward and stared into Dean’s eyes. Dean had stared back defiantly, but there had been fear in his gaze, too, and it had overwhelmed the defiance.
“You’re different, Dean,” Alastair had said. “I want more from you than your screams. They’re delicious, and they thrill me, but I need more. You’re filled with something fascinating, Dean Winchester, and I want to taste it.”
“Screw you,” Dean had snapped, and then Alastair had kissed him and Dean hadn’t been able to speak any more.
Unusual.
Yeah.
~ ~ ~
Castiel is waiting for them when they get back to the motel.
He’s facing the door as they walk into their room, Sam’s hands aching to take Dean’s arm and support him because he looks as though he’s going to collapse. Dean is being stubbornly, perfectly Deanish, refusing to allow himself to be helped, but Sam can see how shaken up he is. Not that he isn’t shaken up himself. He’s so beyond ‘shaken up’ that he isn’t even in the same zip code. He’s seen some terrible shit in his time, but those bodies were right up there. And the fact that his brother could’ve done that, whether consciously or not? Sam can’t even process it. Stuff like that, you can’t process. You just push it to one side and never think about it ever again.
“Oh, great,” Dean hisses, taking one look at the angel, and his hand falls on a chest of drawers to steady himself as Sam shuts the door behind them. Under all the blood, the sickening gore coating him from head to toe, Dean looks as pale as death.
“You are not yourself,” says Castiel, and it’s possibly the most redundant thing anyone has ever said to anybody.
“You’re tellin’ me,” Dean sighs back.
“Cas, we need your help. He’s having blackouts.” Sam’s voice is filled with need and hope; he still has faith in angels, despite the fact angels have no faith in him. He can forgive, too, and he has, but he knows there is still danger here. Never more so, perhaps, than now, because Dean has murdered people.
Castiel stares at Dean. “We know you didn’t do this, Dean. The blood may be on your hands, but your hands were not your own.”
“Then whose were they?” Dean snaps, frustration pouring out of him like something physical. “What the hell is going on with me?”
Castiel’s eyes narrow and he shakes his head. “We don’t know. That’s why I’m here.” He glides forward, all confidence and poise, and stops in front of Dean, so close that Dean unconsciously presses himself against the drawers to escape him. Castiel stares into his eyes, his forehead furrowed and his expression searching, and Sam suddenly realizes that Castiel’s looking right into Dean’s mind and yes, he’s that powerful.
“It’s inside you,” the angel says, sounding puzzled. “I see it now.”
“Well, aren’t you observant?” says Dean, and his fist comes from nowhere.
Castiel – the powerful, regal and impossibly strong Castiel – is sprawled on the floor a second later.
~ ~ ~
There’s surprisingly little sex in Hell. Up in Heaven, they’re at it like rabbits, but in the Pit it’s not very popular.
It makes sense when you think about it: sex is about pleasure, of course; it makes you feel good, and that’s not really Hell’s raison d’etre. But there’s another side to sex that you’d think would be tailor-made for Hell, and that side is rape. It’s the one thing every living human being fears – both men and women, although it’s more of an issue for women, obviously, society being what it is and all. But down in Hell? Not so much. Because rape is about afflicting pain, and that’s what Hell’s about anyway, and when there are so many ways to hurt a soul, rape is only one of about a million choices.
What’s some forced sex compared to having your entrails snipped into tiny pieces with a pair of rusty scissors while you watch?
Rape isn’t even used to humiliate, as it is so regularly on the surface. Once you’ve wept your ten billionth tear and wailed ‘stop’ so many times you’ve forgotten every other word in your vocabulary, you’re pretty much beyond humiliation.
So sex and Hell don’t mix.
For the most part.
“Say it, Dean,” Alastair had urged him, and Dean had bitten all the way through his lip to keep from screaming, only this time he wasn’t just screaming screaming; he was screaming for more.
After 27 years he was actually experiencing something that wasn’t pain. After 27 miserable, agonizing, wretched, terrifying years he was opening his eyes every morning in a fresh body that he knew would become more and more damaged as the day wore on... but at least now he had the knowledge that Alastair would make him feel good first. A few seconds of bliss, a few seconds of rapturous, orgasmic joy; mere moments of burning fire that came from a good place inside him rather than the bad place all around him.
Every morning now, every single, quite-literally-God-damned one of them, Dean Winchester would empty himself because of Alastair, and Alastair would empty himself into Dean.
It didn’t even matter that Alastair would spend the rest of the day with a razorblade in his hand. After all: pain and pleasure; lust and love. Just words, but words with edges that can blur together until they mean the same thing.
One day Dean had buckled and broken and climbed down off the rack, and that was the day when those fleeting seconds of daily pleasure spun into a decade, a decade in which Dean became Alastair and Dean and everything else was forgotten.
~ ~ ~
Dean has Sam slammed against a wall so quickly that Sam doesn’t make a sound, not even as he impacts, because he’s too shocked to breathe in. Dean’s hand is around his throat and Dean’s smiling and his eyes are white, totally white, and Sam can’t believe it because it happened so fast.
“Hey, little bro,” demon-Dean says cheerfully. “Figured it was my turn to get ridden for once.”
“You can fight this, Dean,” Sam croaks, but he already knows how hard it is to control a demon inside you because he’s been there himself and he wasn’t able to do it. Neither of them are their father. Neither of them are that strong.
“Dean isn’t really into the whole ‘fighting’ thing,” says his not-brother. “He’s more of a ‘lie back and take it’ kinda guy.”
Castiel is on his feet now and Sam’s eyes shoot across to him. The angel looks angry – make that furious – and he growls out a warning in a dangerous voice Sam has heard him use before, back in a barn during a long, tension-filled night that ended with an angel regaining her Grace.
“Let him go or you will suffer. You can’t have him.”
“Always one with the idle threats, aren’t we, angel?” snaps demon-Dean, and without any warning he throws Sam across the room. Sam smashes into a table and for a few moments the world is a whited-out wall of pain, but he’s only bruised, it’s not serious, and once he’s caught his breath he can sit up again.
Castiel and Dean are a few feet apart, glaring at each other with such animosity that Sam wants to duck and cover, right there.
“You didn’t come off too well the last time we met, sonny,” says Dean, his eyes still obstinately white, and suddenly Sam knows who’s inside him.
“You took me by surprise,” Castiel returns, “Alastair. I know you now. I recognize your true face. I bested you in Hell, and I can do so again.”
“Really? Because you’ll have to destroy your favorite human if you want to kill me. I don’t think you’ll do that. You’re rather fond of young Dean, aren’t you?”
Sam can’t stop himself; he knows he has to distract Alastair, do anything he can to throw him off balance, so he concentrates and brings his powers to bear on his brother. He knows he can’t exorcise him – “You don’t have the juice,” as Alastair had told him once – but if he can throw him off guard, perhaps Castiel...
“That won’t work, Sammy,” says the demon with Dean’s voice, and shit, it sounds so wrong to hear Dean sneer like that. “You can try to squeeze me out of him all you want, but Dean doesn’t want to let me go. The only thing that’ll push me outta this heap of flesh and blood is him.”
“Cas, can’t you exorcise him or something?” Sam’s voice is filled with pleading, because if ever he needed an angel, if ever his brother needed an angel, it’s right now.
But Castiel is gazing at Dean with a curious look on his face, and when he turns to Sam his eyes are wide. “No. He’s telling the truth.”
“Demons lie!” snaps Sam, desperate.
“Not this time.” Castiel turns back to Alastair-Dean and there’s amazement in his expression. “Dean is holding onto him,” he says. “He’s chosen this, Sam.”
~ ~ ~
“You have no choice,” Castiel had told Alastair on September 18, 2008. “God has commanded it, and you will release him.”
Angels, contrary to popular belief, can move freely through Hell whenever they so desire. Being angels, of course, they never desire it. And there are temptations down there, old friends to chew the fat with (possibly literally, if those old friends are hungry; it’s not like only skinny people fall into Hell). Lucifer had left many pals in Heaven, and those pals occasionally look back and remember how beautiful he was and how he wasn’t really such a bad guy before he had a few issues with the Almighty. Nobody wants the one they knew as Lightbringer to walk upon the Earth because that would be a bad, bad thing, but every so often an angel does pop down to Hell to remind him what he’s missing. Or who he’s missing. Or just how much God is still really, really pissed at him, and how he should never show his face in the heavenly ’hood ever again.
Y’know. Things of that nature.
Castiel was not one of those angels. Castiel never knew Lucifer, never cared to know Lucifer, and he’d never been to Hell before he was given his orders to rescue Dean Winchester. He’d found it everything he was expecting and worse; a hideous, chaotic place as far removed from the serenity of Heaven as could possibly be imagined, and then some. He couldn’t be harmed down there – even the blood ran off his wings – but he took away memories he sincerely regretted experiencing, memories that harmed him in other ways.
He also took away Dean, and that was a battle all of its own.
Dean had been standing side by side with a demon Castiel knew was named Alastair (or at least, that was his name this century), and his eyes had been wild and fearful as he’d gazed upon Castiel’s holy visage.
“You can’t have him,” Alastair had said, full of his own importance. He was powerful in that realm, yes, but Castiel was on a mission from God and he was powerful in ways Alastair couldn’t comprehend.
“You will give him to me,” the angel had ordered.
“No,” Dean had gasped, taking Alastair’s arm, and Castiel’s eyes had narrowed at the sight. He was half-demon already, dangerous and wicked, and Castiel couldn’t possibly fathom why he had been sent to return such a tainted creature to his earthly body.
“Have you any idea how long it took me to make him my own?” hissed Alastair, his hideous face crumpling into a frown. “How hard I had to work? How much flesh I had to peel from his bones, how much blood I had to wade through? He is mine, angel, and God can’t have him!”
By way of an answer, Castiel had raised a hand and everything around them had turned white.
(Angels can purify stuff. It’s their thing. Even Hell, if necessary, although they’re not powerful enough to sanctify the entire place. And hey, that’s probably a good thing, because if they could there’d be two Heavens and nowhere for the bad guys to go when they carked it.)
“Stop it, stop it, stop it!” Alastair had screamed, shielding his eyes from the light, and Dean had screamed too, a sound that had fascinated Castiel beyond all measure. He’d never heard anybody scream like that before; it had sent a shiver through his very essence, and if you’d given him a thousand years to think about it, he still couldn’t have explained why.
For a moment, just a moment, he’d wondered what would happen if he placed his lips over that mouth and swallowed the scream whole. Could an angel purify something so corrupted and desperate?
“I’ll go, I’ll go, just stop hurting him!” Dean had cried, pulling away from Alastair. He’d blindly staggered forwards, right into Castiel’s arms, before collapsing on his knees. Alastair had expelled a low growl of loss behind him but Castiel was already moving, taking Dean by the arm and carrying him away, and it wasn’t until a few moments before he’d released him back into his body that Castiel had taken a look inside his mind, curious to discover what it was about this twisted, broken human that had so demanded his Father’s attention.
And that was when he’d understood everything Dean had gone through at Alastair’s hands.
Like we said, Castiel took away memories he sincerely regretted experiencing.
~ ~ ~
“That’s not true,” Sam cries, because it isn’t, it can’t be, no way would Dean want a demon inside him. For a moment he wonders if Alastair and Castiel are working together, but then he sees the sadness in the angel’s eyes and knows that he’s clutching at straws.
“Sometimes you just gotta face the facts, Sam,” says demon-Dean blithely, waving a finger at him. “As of this very moment, your brother wants me more than he wants you.”
“No,” hisses Sam, climbing to his feet. He’s at Castiel’s side an instant later, standing shoulder to shoulder with him, two against one, except that the ‘one’ is technically ‘two’. “Dean would never choose you over me,” he says with conviction. “You’re lying. You’re controlling him.”
“He’s not,” Castiel says softly, and Sam is shocked at how sad he sounds. “Dean let him in. His ward is intact; the only way Alastair could have entered him was if he was invited. Even if Dean didn’t know he was doing it, it’s happened. It probably took place as he dreamt, without his conscious knowledge.”
Dean smiles and his eyes turn hazel again. “Not just a pretty face, are you, Cas?” he breezes. “Got it in one. Dean didn’t know he’d let me in, but his soul doesn’t want to let me go now.” He tilts his head and grins at Sam. “What you don’t understand, Sammy, is that Dean and I were very close in Hell. Closer than you and I ever were, in more ways than you can imagine. You don’t know somebody for 40-odd years without learning a lot about each other, and I learnt a lot about your brother during our time together. I know what makes him scream.”
“Shut up,” Sam tells him, dangerously. “Just shut up and let him go.”
“I don’t just mean scream, Sam. I mean scream.” There’s something about the way he says it, the look in his eyes, the way his hand drops to his groin and lingers there suggestively, that lets Sam know exactly what it is he’s saying.
Suddenly Sam’s sweating, unable to believe what he’s hearing, and the room shifts a little out of focus as the shock hits. Holy shit, that’s not anything he wants to think about. Holy shit, that’s just... holy shit... Dean. What he went through...
Castiel’s hand settles on his back, and afterwards Sam will wonder whether it was a gesture of support or just an accident, but either way it helps him gather himself together.
“No,” he says urgently. “Come on, Dean. Fight him. You don’t want Alastair in there with you. You’re not evil, Dean. You’re better than him.”
Alastair-Dean shrugs. “Do you really think he’d choose his cheating, lying brother over me? I’ve never lied to him; I’ve never gone behind his back. He knows that I will never call him weak or do anything except praise him for his talents. You? You’re a millstone around his neck. With me, he’s free. He can do whatever he wants. Those people we killed today? They were murderers; their souls were already marked for Hell. We just sent them on their way a little early, and it felt good. Really good. We could get used to such things. We can have fun together, more fun than you two ever would.”
“Don’t listen to him, Dean,” Sam pleads, realizing that this is the most important conversation he’ll ever have with his brother, and yet he doesn’t even know if his brother is listening. “Please, come back to me. You can’t just give up on us, man. We’ve got so much left to do! Don’t you care that we have to stop Lilith?”
“Oh, he cares,” agrees the demon, flashing a meaningful grin at Castiel. “But he doesn’t like being ordered around.”
“Alastair is ordering you around, Dean!” Sam’s voice is desperate.
“Makes a change from you, you superior little prick,” Alastair snaps back, and Sam has to fight the urge to punch him, whether he’s wearing Dean’s face or not.
“Dean, listen to me,” says Castiel suddenly. His voice is firm and solemn, filled with intensity and power, and it makes Sam’s heart flutter in his chest. It sounds the way an angel’s voice should sound. “I know about you and Alastair, Dean. I know what happened between you over all those years, and I know the terrible things you did, both to innocent souls and to each other.”
He steps forward, and Dean’s face twists into a scowl as he regards him. “That is behind you now,” Castiel says, and there is such kindness in his tone that it almost hurts. “You are alive and well, and you have your brother and your life back, and God has saved you. You are forgiven, Dean. You have a fresh start. Don’t throw it away on a false allegiance.”
Alastair all but hisses at the words. “‘False?’ You call our relationship ‘false’? Dean loves me, more than he loves Sam or you or God or anybody. What does Dean want with a brother who consorts with demons? A brother who keeps secrets from him? Dean’s been betrayed by the man he went to Hell for!”
“That’s not true,” Sam stresses. “I’ve never betrayed him! You’re twisting everything, you sick son-of-a-bitch!”
“He needs me, Sammy,” Alastair says, and there’s nothing of Dean in his expression at all as he says it. “He loves me.”
“You are confusing ‘love’ with ‘fear’,” Castiel replies evenly. “You offered him respite from pain. He had no choice but to follow you. You tricked him, like you trick all your victims.” He reaches across and takes Dean’s arm, squeezing flesh hard under his fingers; Alastair doesn’t flinch.
“You are a good man, Dean Winchester,” says the angel. “Sam believes in you. I believe in you. God believes in you.”
Something flashes in Dean’s eyes, something uncertain and worried. His face pales under all the dried blood and suddenly, unexpectedly, he looks right at Sam.
“Please, Dean,” Sam begs, taking advantage of his attention. “We need you. I need you.”
Dean takes a sharp, sudden breath and steps backwards, his body shaking. “S-Sam,” he says, and Sam knows it’s Dean speaking now, and he wants to hug him more than anything but it’s not over yet.
“Get him out of you,” he pleads. “Force him out, Dean. Don’t let him stay there. Please, man, just do it.”
“He... we...” Dean stammers, and there’s such a look of horror on his face that Sam just knows he’s remembering everything that happened in Hell. Somehow, Sam understands then that Dean had forgotten it. That he’d blocked it out, right until now. Everything he and Alastair had done has just come back to him, and Dean looks as though he’s dying from the force of it.
“Dean...” he whispers, feeling his pain as well, because that’s what brothers do.
“No,” Dean moans. “No, it can’t be true... I dreamt it or something... none of that happened...” He stares at Castiel, and his eyes are wide and desperate. “Tell me it didn’t happen, Cas. Tell me I imagined it!”
“Dean, you must be strong,” Castiel responds, and he releases Dean’s arm and places a hand on his cheek instead. “I know you’re strong, and I know you can do this. Send him back to Hell. Do it now, in God’s name.”
Dean is gasping, gulping in huge lungfuls of air, gazing at Castiel with tormented eyes. He looks at Sam and groans, knees buckling, and then he’s on his hands and knees on the floor.
“I hate you,” Dean moans, and there’s defiance mixed with misery in the words. “I hate you, Alastair! I hate you and I want you out of my body! I’m not yours, I’m not, I’m not!”
A spasm shakes his body, and suddenly he jerks back onto his knees and opens his mouth and a steady, writhing stream of smoke pours from throat and swirls around the room, bending and twisting almost angrily in the air until it seeps through the doorframe and away.
Dean falls onto his hands and knees again, shuddering and panting hard.
Sam is just about to sink down beside him when, to his surprise, Castiel gets there first. The angel kneels before Dean and places his hands on his shoulders, squeezing them gently.
“Alastair was strong,” he says. “Don’t feel as though you were weak to fall under his spell. You defeated him in the end, and that’s what matters. You’re back.”
“You knew all along,” Dean says, and his voice is quiet and strangled. “You knew about us and you never said anything. I couldn’t remember you pulling me out of the Pit until now, and I couldn’t remember anything except that he tortured me. None of it, I couldn’t remember any of it.” He looks up at Castiel with eyes that are red and wet. “You took the memories away, didn’t you?”
“No, Dean,” Castiel says softly. “I didn’t. You did that to yourself. But they were always there, and that’s how Alastair got to you.”
Dean is clearly choking back tears. “I can’t believe... the things we did... And oh God, those people! We killed those people!”
“That wasn’t you, Dean. That was him.” Sam’s voice is firm, expecting no argument, because it’s true. He killed somebody once, too, and it hadn’t been his fault. It had taken him a long time to realize that.
“I remember doing it, Sam,” Dean says frantically, staring up at him. “I remember how it felt!”
“I can make you forget, Dean,” Castiel says, and again Sam finds that he can’t believe how kind his words are. “I can erase Alastair from your mind. You needn’t relive those memories. I can hold onto them for you instead.”
Dean falls silent, studying the angel’s face, looking shocked. “No,” he answers, after a pause. His voice is small and pained, but he sounds as though he’s gaining control of himself once more. “I need to remember. I need to remember how low I can go, so that I know I’m higher now.”
“You will rise even higher, Dean,” Castiel tells him. “I’m sure of it.”
He places a hand on Dean’s head and closes his eyes, saying a silent prayer for him. Then he leans across and kisses Dean gently on the lips, not caring that they’re coated in someone else’s blood, or that Dean makes a low sound in his throat that signals that he doesn’t understand why he deserves it.
Castiel hadn’t swallowed Dean’s scream for him in Hell, but he can do it now, so he does.
Sam stares at them both, genuinely moved by the sight, and then the angel is gone. He kneels beside his brother.
“I never betrayed you, Dean,” he says. “Never.”
Dean looks at him sharply, then nods. “I know, Sammy,” he says weakly. “I know.”
“Come on,” Sam declares. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”
Sam doesn’t know it, but Dean’s already clean. Castiel cleansed his soul, and Dean is pure again.
An angel’s love can do that, you see.
~ ~ ~
The thing about Hell is that there’s always fresh meat.
Alastair looks at the soul on the rack before him and sighs. The guy is roughly Dean’s age, blond-haired, blue-eyed. His face is a rictus of fear and pain and he’s staring at Alastair as though he’s never seen anything more terrifying in his life. It’s an expression the demon never saw on Dean’s face; Dean had seen far worse during his years as a hunter.
So few of the souls that fell into the Pit knew anything about the supernatural world around them. So few even believed their new home even existed. There’d been something liberating about Dean’s familiarity, something Alastair had loved; it had saved precious time.
Dean.
Alastair looks at the knife in his hand, wondering idly whether to use it or whether today is more of a machete day. Machete Monday, perhaps. Or is it Tuesday? He doesn’t really care, but he has a sense of humor and the idea of a Machete Monday tickles him. The machete it is, then.
The soul before him wails in apprehension as he picks up his weapon and Alastair winces. Nobody sounds like Dean. Nobody has that scream, the one that did unusual things to his dick. Alastair wonders if he’ll ever meet anybody like him again, but it doesn’t seem likely; the angels have him now, damn them all.
Perhaps, if Alastair’s lucky, Dean will fuck up and God will change his mind. He wonders how long it would take to break him again if he ever ended up back on the rack, and comes to the conclusion it wouldn’t take long at all.
Dean was terrified of being on his own, of not being needed, and Alastair thought that he probably did need him, if only a little.
And Hell was a very lonely place, after all.
~ ~ ~