Supernatural: evil and ugly
Title: evil and ugly
Pairing: Gen
Rating: T
Disclaimer: Not mine
Summary: All his life Dean has had nightmares.
A/N: Fair warning, disturbing imagery and a touch of profanity lay below. Beware.
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, Beyond Good and Evil
All his life Dean has had nightmares.
It was inevitable for a child who had been raised with the knowledge that the monster under the bed was not only real, but a vicious beast - out for your blood and in no way limited to the dark and shadowy places that linger in the infinite minutes between lights out and sleep. Dean had dreams of werewolves and Shtriga, of being suffocated by a ghost or strung up by vengeful spirits.
Now, since September 18th, Dean dreamed of the exact sensation of his muscles being flayed from his bone, inch by inch. Of the way his marrow would spurt into the air as they cracked and crushed each bone in his body. Of the smell of searing flesh, made only more vivid once his eyes had been popped like overripe grapes. Of never eating or drinking, forever hungry, starving, to the point the pains of his stomach nearly surpassed that of his body. Of the blessed darkness that would wash over his broken body before rising, miraculously whole, only to begin the cycle again. And again. And again.
At first Dean thought to spite them - his torturers, Lillith, whoever - by not screaming, he wasn’t going to give them the satisfaction. This lasted for nearly four days to the vicious amusement of onlookers, until Alistair arrived. Alistair with his personal collection of knives and anecdotes wrung his first of many screams from him quite quickly.
“This is more colloquially known as a Catherine wheel. Fancy that, they name it after the martyr saint then use it again and again in the name of the Catholic Church. Terribly popular during the Inquisition. Oh! And the Salem Witch Hunts! What a hoot!” He turned his head from the amicably chatting demon and fought the instinct to wretch, as they wound his shattered arms and legs around the spokes of the wheel, his limbs sickeningly malleable with his bones crushed so absolutely.
“Oh how rude of me, would you like some?” Alistair offered up some dripping piece of meat while Dean kept his gaze averted from the taunting grin in his Halloween mask of a face, bits of gore caught between the beast’s teeth. Absently, he prodded at the still tender sockets left in his mouth from where Alistair had pulled each tooth, one by one, from his jaw that morning.
“Now then,” Dean gasped back to life shaking, his body whole and unmarred but the sight of Alistair’s hands diving into the open wound which covered his torso and twisting, was burned into his eyelids, a horrific corona of red light staining the vision. “This could all be over Dean. As much as I’ll miss our little, get-togethers, you would be just fabulous at all of this. So is it off that rack? All you have to do is give back a little of what you got; I mean, they’re all in Hell for a reason Dean. You’re a... special case.”
“Fuck you.”
But more than that, more than the nightmares of brutal, blood-drenched imagery was the sensation of his hands rending flesh from bone. Of face after face, soul after soul, placed before him, stretched upon the self-same rack he had hung upon for thirty years, blurring together. Of losing count, first of the screams, then of the pleas, then of the sound of snapping bones, then of the people themselves; losing count of these horrendous acts, no matter that each left its own open sore upon his bruised and battered soul.
“I-I’ll do it.” Alistair stiffened slightly but didn’t turn from his nightly chores of cleaning his knives from the, dirt, they picked up during a day’s work.
“Pardon?”
“I said I’ll do it. Just... Just let me down.”
Since he was four Dean has had an intimate knowledge of death.
And now Death has an intimate knowledge of him.