Hell is black --
-- and white.
Black blood.
Black meat.
White teeth.
White bones.
Alistair is fire and shadows. Eyes like coals, clawed fingers, pointed teeth. His breath is smoke and tastes of ashes. Everyday Dean wakes up white and whole and Alistair gently breaks him, pulls him apart, until he's nothing but dark meat.
Dean doesn't wonder what green looks like anymore.
---
Days in hell feel as long as days on Earth.
Weeks turn into months until Dean loses track of how long he's been chained to the rack.
Alistair is an artist with his blade, his teeth, his hands, his forked tongue - but even so, there are only so many ways to slice and burn. Eventually it stops being new. He exhausts his torturer's playbook.
Stupidly Dean thinks it will get easier after that.
If he knows Alistair's worst, if he's already endured it, what more is there to fear?
He's wrong of course. Alistair is infinitely patient. He delights in sliding hands over Dean's remade flesh every morning, in drawing out even the simplest of things.
Whipping the skin from Dean's back or pulling the nails from his fingers thrills him as much as the more exotic techniques he employs. Splitting open his ribcage, breaking the bones and prying his chest open like the wings of bird so he can sink his fingers into the glistening dark shapes within. Stroke Dean from the inside. Squeeze the breath from his lungs. Biting away the flesh of his face and jaw then carefully easing an eye from its socket so it hangs over the ruined flesh and he can see the horror of his body from an impossible angle. The shadows of his lungs, the twisting coils of his stomach, Alistair's hands as he buries them inside Dean and pulls and pets at things. The dark, secret parts of him.
Over and over.
And every night, when he's nothing but twisted flesh, just before Alistair deafens him with boiling pitch or sharp nails, he asks Dean the same question. "Is today the Day Deano? gonna pick up the blade?"
Dean says no.
A hundred, a thousand, ten thousand times.
A lifetime passes. So long Dean is sure he's been down here far longer than he was ever a man.
His memories of his life, the things he loved, the reason he made the damn deal in the first place, they're so faded he can hardly remember them. All he knows is pain and Alistair's voice whispering in his ear.
One day when Alistair asks him the question, he nods.
When he slices open the woman-shaped soul tied to the rack in his place, it's satisfying in a way. She's a damned. They all are. There are no innocents down here. Her screams are sweet to him because they aren't his.
---
Fifteen thousand days after the hounds dragged down into the fire and dark, the angel Castiel lays his hands upon Dean.
YOU ARE READING
Grey
FanfictionIn a world where people don't see in color until they find their true mate, the first thing Dean sees when he pulls himself out of his grave is the blue sky. When Castiel raised him from the Pit, he inadvertently claimed Dean as his mate.
