pixel_0 | Underbelly (Gen, PG-13)

Title: Underbelly
Rating: PG-13
Category: Gen oneshot
Word Count: ~1020
Characters: Dean, Sam, and demons
Spoilers: 4.10 "Heaven and Hell"
Summary: Dean remembers Hell.
Warnings: Dark!fic, not happy or pretty
Author’s Notes: Coda to episode 4.10, immediately following the ending events
Disclaimer: The following characters and situations are used without permission of the creators, owners, and further affiliates of the television show, Supernatural, to whom they rightly belong. I claim only what is mine, and I make no money off what is theirs.

- - - - -

He drives. He drives with Sam by his side and the road laid out in front of him, a thick snake showing its black underbelly. He drives with his words and memories ringing in his mind, unshakable and drenched in blood.

Sam doesn't say anything following Dean's admission on the roadside. There is nothing to be said. Nothing that could fix or help now. His presence is enough for Dean, and they both know that. Words will come when they’re ready. When Dean’s ready.

With his sin, his act that he'll never be able to forgive himself for, out in the open now, he can allow himself to think about it. Replay the memories, replay the moments over and over without alcohol and denial to dull them.

He remembers being there, down there, and he remembers Alastair's voice hissing in his ear, a slippery roll of words, as Dean bled and screamed and whimpered with his entrails around his feet and his heart on the floor.

"I can stop this, you know," Alastair would say, every day, every day of blood and madness and rampant hellfire. "I can stop this, take you off this rack, if you do one thing for me."

And Dean, he remembers answering him, asking him, even though they'd flayed off the skin of his lips and ripped away his teeth, one by careful one, he asked him, "What thing?"

"Bring me souls. Bring them to me and torture them as I have tortured you, and I'll let you go."

It wasn't easy to refuse. Hard when he could taste the warm salt of blood in the back of his throat and his own flesh they shoved in his mouth for him eat, but he refused. Sometimes, the only satisfaction he could find in that godforsaken abomination was the flash in Alastair's eyes at being told no.

But, then. Then, thirty years later, Dean said yes. He said yes because every day they invented new ways to torture him. It wasn't always a knife. Wasn't always fire on his skin or acid in his eyes. Wasn't always poison on his stomach or worms underneath his skin. There was always more. Always something more.

And, he was human. He was still human, and he was weak like an animal in a cage, and he could no longer take it.

So, when Alastair smiled and said, "What about today, Dean? What do you say today?" he lifted his eyes and answered, "Yes," with half of his face torn away and his jawbone squish-squashing in his face.

This is what he tells Sam. He tells him this much. He doesn't tell Sam the rest.

He doesn't tell Sam the details of how he dragged the people to the rack and made them suffer in every way he suffered. He doesn't tell Sam how he tried to be merciful in cutting out their eyes first so they could not see what was coming. He doesn't tell Sam that the demons found out about his actions, his futile attempts to be merciful, and how, they punished him for those because in Hell, there is never mercy to be found. Never mercy to be tried.

The demons found out, Alastair found out about how Dean cried when he tortured those poor damned souls and how he would take care to remove their eyes to spare them that much, and Alastair said to him, "I'll make you pay for this, boy" with a sneer on his blackened lip. "I'll hit you right where you're soft. Right in your soft, fleshy underbelly."

Dean waited to be taken back to the rack. He waited for it, but for days, for weeks and months, nothing changed. He still tortured them, he still tried to find mercy for those wretched people, until one day. Until one day, they brought a man to him and pinned him to the racks.

He was an ordinary man, a sinner like the hundreds Dean had tortured before him, but then Alastair said, "Here, Dean, see how you like this one," and he placed his hand over the man's face. And the features shifted, the skin moved, and when Alastair took his hand away, Dean staggered backwards.

"No, no, not this one."

"Back on the rack for you, then?" Alastair said and lifted his knife. Trailed it below Dean's chin, hard enough to draw blood, soft enough to sting.

Dean swallowed then, he remembers that now, the feel of saliva down the back of his parched throat. He swallowed, and he looked from Alastair's demon face to the face of the man on the rack, the face that Alastair had given the man--Sam's face. Dean looked from that face, and even in knowing that it wasn't really Sam, wasn't really his floppy hair or large eyes, wasn't his pleading words on his broken vocal cords, Dean still couldn't go through with it.

"Back on the rack," Dean answered, and he closed his eyes, waiting. Waiting for the pain to begin again. Waiting for the end to begin all over again. Waiting because he would never touch Sam, never hurt Sam, never look at Sam with the glow of hellfire on his face.

That was when there was light and he was pulled up. Pulled up and away and brought to Earth where Castiel laid him in a wooden coffin below the ground.

He glances over at Sam now in the car, and Dean wants to say something. Say something smart-assed and funny to make Sam smirk and look at him, but there's nothing to be said. Not right now anyway.

So, he reaches forward, and he turns on the radio to play a song that's familiar enough for him to slip into its melody and lyrics, slip inside and temporarily forget.

Sam looks up from where he's staring out the window. "You okay?" he asks.

Dean glances over at Sam and smiles tightly. He smiles and swallows down the bile in the back of his throat. Swallows down the memory of his own screams from Hell and Sam's face on that man. "Working on it, Sammy," he replies. "I'm working on it."

End

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