Fic: Carving
Title: Carving
Rating: M
Warnings: Torture
Word Count: 1,419
Summary: Dean Winchester breaks in Hell and begins his apprenticeship. His first victim should look familiar. She certainly recognizes him.
Notes: Written for SRS2012: Bonus Round 4 - Speechless. Prompt: Dean & Bela in Hell.
Dean Winchester gives in on the hundred and fourth day of his twenty-ninth year in Hell. He will later say that he lasted thirty years. He didn’t. It was twenty-nine.
The chains slip off his wrists, and his body sags forward, caught by sickeningly familiar hands. They hold him and stroke him while the demon carries him away, whispering to him, singing to him as if they were friends, as if they were family. Well, suppose they are now. He doesn’t ask any questions as he’s knitted back together, just stares blankly up to the grinning face that’s shushing him while he sobs like a child. Dean sees himself in Alastair’s eyes for a moment, and he almost wants to back out and change his mind, but he won’t because he can’t. This is the only way to make the pain stop, and that is all he cares about right now. He has to make the pain stop, and so, on the hundred and fourth day of his twenty-ninth year in Hell, Dean Winchester picks up the knife and begins his apprenticeship.
She recognizes him long before he recognizes her, or perhaps he recognizes her and simply doesn’t care. That seems likely. Then again, he hardly looks at her long enough to be able to recognize her. His eyes are fixated on the little collection of razors and scalpels, nodding in understanding as the pets the back of his neck. With a sweeping gesture, Alastair gives Dean free reign over what he will use, and when Dean chooses his first tool, the demon nods in approval.
Bela is no fool. She knows how it works down here. You get carved up until you relent and become one of them. You get sliced into pieces and glued back together, but you’re not the same. All the good is cut out of you, if ever it was there, and replaced with that sick selfishness that makes it easy to torture other people so long as it means you get to be free from that suffering. Frankly, she thinks it’s a pretty decent deal. She’s willing to bet that most everyone down here is a total piece of crap anyway, and her motto has always, always been every woman for herself, really. That’s probably why nobody offers her the chance to pick up a blade. They know she’ll take it, and they’re saving her for something special.
Her hands are pinned above her head, and her body is stretched out painfully taut before them. Bela thinks it’s a little strange that she’s still covered by scraps of clothing until she remembers that she’s not really corporeal at all anymore. Her body is somewhere on Earth, rotting in the ground or getting gnawed on by Hellhounds. She wonders then if he sees the same thing she sees. She wonders if Dean can see her. He’s the self-righteous type, as she recalls. He probably agreed to this because he thought he’d be cutting up the sort of people who would shoot the guy behind the convenience store counter so they could walk away with the eighty bucks in his till, the sort of guy who slips drugs into the pretty blonde’s drink and then offers her a ride home, or maybe the sort of man who comes into his little girl’s room at night and puts his hand under her nightgown. Bela laughs then, at the sheer irony of it all, and she notices that the sound is stifled and there’s a thick metallic taste in her mouth. Some of it is undoubtedly from the chain pressing her lips apart but pressing them in a way that renders speech impossible, but part of it is certainly the little droplets of blood that have begun to seep from the corners of her mouth where the flesh is cracked from being held apart for too long. It’s in this moment that Bela realizes she cannot call his name.
She wonders if it would make any difference. She wonders if hearing his name, hearing her voice call his name would give him any pause at all. The more she watches the dark glint in his eyes, the more she doubts it. After all, she’s nothing but a cold-hearted bitch who sold her soul so that a demon would take care of daddy for her. He doesn’t care, she knows. Why should he?
Dean steps forward, blade in hand, and it’s a nasty, curved, rusty thing that looks too dull to be very efficient. That’s the point, she soon learns. Dean is not efficient. He does not cut, and he does not slice. He tears. The jagged edge of the blade hooks into her. Dean hooks it into her, and then he pulls, rips pieces of her off. Despite her best resolve, Bela screams, but she can’t even hear it over the high, uneven laughter of the white-eyed demon. Dean never makes a sound, and that’s even worse. Bela strains against her bonds then, not because she wants to get away but because she wants to get his attention. She wants him to look at her, to acknowledge her, to confront the fact that she is a person, a person he knows, a person who once helped him, in her way, and now he is tearing her apart. He doesn’t.
He tires of the curved blade and switches to a flat, heavy knife. The slices are neat and precise, artful, red lines that section off flesh that Bela keeps telling herself should not hurt like this because it really does not exist. When he puts the knife down, she thinks it must be over. This is her moment, the moment when the demon will come to her with the knife and make her the same offer he makes everybody else. He doesn’t. He just smiles as he pulls Dean over to him, cradling the back of his neck again as he presents him with a fresh array of options. What is left to cut though? What is left of her? It turns out, a great deal.
Dean returns with a scalpel, and it’s a tiny, unassuming little thing, and Bela thinks that after what all has been done to her, it’s a pretty sad attempt. She’s wrong. Alastair runs his fingers over her body, showing Dean where the little patches of intact skin hide sensitive bundles of nerves that require the more delicate touch of the miniscule blade. She isn’t sure which is worse, the demon’s hands or Dean’s blade. Screaming was one thing, but now Bela cries. Her lips press into the metal against her teeth in an attempt to stifle the choked, shameful noise simply because she will not give them the satisfaction of breaking her.
And they don’t. Bela endures everything with a strange resolve, a strange determination that she holds at the core of her soul, even as screams and tears are pulled from a body that doesn’t really exist. She knows it’s over when the demon begins to caress Dean’s back and croon in his ear about how wonderful he’s done, how damn proud he is of his special boy. Dean stays impassive. He walks over to release Bela, to hand her over to be healed so they can begin anew. It’s then, and only then, that he looks at her. Their eyes meet through a haze of sweat and blood and tears. She knows then that he recognizes her, and she knows that he can tell she knows. For one second, she expects something, though she’s not sure what. An apology would be insufficient. A promise would be a lie. Dean stares at her calmly. He says nothing. She says nothing, but she swears right then and there that if Dean Winchester offers her to pick up the knife, she will refuse. She will laugh in his face and spit the word no at him as hard as she can because she is better than him and he needs to know it. The look on his face in that moment will be worth every rip and slice and tear that he could ever fathom.
Dean Winchester doesn’t break her. Nobody breaks her. When Bela takes the knife, it is, as she swore, not from his hands, but he’s the one she’s thinking about when she holds it. He’ll always be the one she’s thinking about, and someday, she’ll claw her way out and find him. He damn well better remember her then.