Drag Me Down Quick (So they don't notice)

Don't Break

    He didn't remember much. Not from before, anyways. If there had been a before. Maybe he had always been here hanging from the rack. He tried to keep those thoughts out of his head, but sometimes he couldn't help it. He didn't scream anymore. After so many years, nothing they did to him even hurt anymore. Pain was so constant that he ignored it. The bad part was when they stopped hurting him. 

     Every day they offered to get him off the rack. If he would only start torturing the other souls then everything would stop. No more pain, no more having his eyeballs fed to him for breakfast every day. But every time he considered their offers, there was an image in his head. An image of a boy with a crooked jaw with his arm around a pretty brunette with dimples and a huge smile. Sometimes it was a dark figure, looming over him. Stiles could never make out its face but rather than being terrifying it was reassuring and safe. These were all he had left. He didn't know who those people were, he didn't know why their faces (or bodily outlines) stopped him from getting off the rack and sometimes he hated them for it but he knew he was there for a reason. He couldn't dishonor the boy with the crooked jaw by giving in.  

     He figured he must have killed them. That would be why he was in hell. He didn't think he would ever want to kill people but sometimes the darkness of hell crept in and he could imagine it so vividly it must be a memory, twisting a sword inside someone, feeling their blood and their pain and everything. The thought kept him on the rack even as time changed form decades to centuries. If he could kill people that innocent and carefree then he deserved everything he was getting. They were all he had left and he knew that the demons would take them from him eventually like they had taken his name and his memories and everything else, but for now he hung on to the image like a lifeline.

     He watched the other souls around him come and go and then come back to rip into him. Some of them lasted days, others years, but all of them broke eventually. All except him. They said he was a legend, the boy who never broke. The new converts trained on him, and the old demons showed up occasionally to try their hand at making him scream. The last one to do so had been Lilith, but that had been over a century ago. She had said he would have to break eventually, the darkness in hell was an unstoppable force that would eventually corrupt even the most bright soul.

     All he knew was that it wouldn't be today.

      Time didn't exist when all one knew was pain. Nothing distinguished day from night, and sometimes he wondered how he even knew what day and night were or if he had made up the concept to keep himself busy. Sometimes he thought he remembered a bright ball of light shining down from a blue sky but then his spleen would be ripped out and who even cared about fantasy gas balls? (How did he know it was gas?) 

      The light came for him out of nowhere. It had been a normal day(?) and Belial had been closely examining the insides of his kidney. It was nothing new, Belial was one of the demons more swayed towards vivisection as their preferred torture methods. He had been mostly ignoring Belial, which made the demon angry but honestly what else was it going to do to him? Then suddenly there was a screeching noise, blinding white light and Belial vanished. Well that was new. Suddenly a new man was standing in front of him, shining from every surface. He didn't look like most demons, and when he opened his mouth and spoke his voice seemed to reverberate through all of hell. 

     "Mieczyslaw Stilinski, I am here to free you."

     Then light took over, and there was nothing.

     Stiles woke up in a coffin.