Title: Devil's Trap
Prompt: by hoodietime : I was kind of bummed when Alastair died. I thought he was one of the show's best villains and I would have have been really interested in them exploring his relationship with Dean further. So, what I would like to see is an AU where Sam is unable to kill Alastair in 4x16, or else he comes back to life SOMEHOW (I'm not especially picky about the details here, haha, and if you go this route the fic can be set in season 4, 5, or at some undetermined point in the future.)
Anyway, basically I'd just like to see the Dean/Alastair relationship explored. Dean knew Alastair for longer than he's known SAM – what does that do to a person? Does Dean have a touch of Stockholm Syndrome? Does he miss the pain, since it was all he knew for so long? If you go the sexual abuse route, how does that effect someone as sexually active as Dean? How would it would affect him if he had the threat of his old torturer gunning for him constantly hanging over his head along with everything else? Etc, etc.
Spoilers: All aired episodes, right up to 5.14. Minor spoilers for 5.13, and pretty major ones for 5.14
Warnings: Blood and gore and bad language. Umm... lots of gore. And torture. Oh, and implied dub-con.
Word Count: 3,770
Disclaimer: After this, I think Dean is probably really, but really happy that I have no real creative control over him.
Neurotic Author's Note: Uh, crap. I have to apologize to hoodietime, because this only resembles her prompt in the vaguest way possible. I tried really, really hard to work in comforting!Sam, and that sort of never happened. In fact, the whole "comfort" part of the h/c equation kind of pretty much doesn't happen here. This was originally a completely different story (it was going to be a casefic, if you can credit it), but the story ended up kind of sucking because I didn't have a proper handle on the characters, and I had to scrap it. Then I re-wrote it.
Neurotic Author's Note #2: This one got really, but really dark on me. I'm not sure why. I think watching 5.14 depressed me. On the other hand, it was watching 5.14 that finally unblocked the story for me, so I dunno.
Neurotic Author's Note #3: I think this ought to be considered mildly AU, in that I've radically altered Dean's behaviour post- "On The Head of a Pin." It assumes that he's actually a lot more broken by his stint in hell than what the show actually portrays.
Neurotic Author's Note #4: This is my first attempt at non-linear fiction. Apologies in advance for taking liberties with the space-time continuum.
Neurotic Author's Note #5: This is unbeta'd, for the record. All errors and unhappy syntax belong entirely to me.
*****
There is water dripping slowly onto the Devil's Trap, and Dean doesn't care.
Alastair smiles at him from beneath half-closed lids, and chills run up and down his spine at the sight of the red film of blood coating his teeth. He wants to lean in and lick it away, flicking the tip of his tongue against the sharp incisors, to feel the edge of white tooth against his flesh. A ribbon of bloody saliva hangs from the demon's bottom lip, dripping red and slick onto the cement floor. Instead he tilts the contents of a bottle of holy water into Alastair's mouth, cuts off his gag reflex, forces the clear liquid down his throat; imagines just how much it must burn as it courses through his oesophagus and into his stomach.
You ask me to open that door and walk through it, you will not like what walks back out.
"I heard you," Alastair can always read his mind. "They might not like what's going to walk back out that door, but I will. You know I will."
"Give me a name."
"Which name would you like? I gave you so many."
You have not disappointed me so far.
"Give me what I want, and this stops."
"I've already given you what you want."
You left part of yourself back in the Pit. Let's see if we can get the two of you back together again, shall we?
There's water dripping on the Devil's Trap, but he doesn't care. They both know he's not really here for answers.
*
There isn't anything left to do except sit at the table and stare at his food. He's forgotten what to do with it. What to do with himself. He thinks if he tries to put it in his mouth it'll turn to ashes and fill his lungs and choke him.
All around people are flitting by, buzzing like angry flies. It's all moving a little faster than he remembers, like one of those old movies. Stop-jerk-run, and he can't quite match the rhythm, and he stares at his plate, watching his food decay. He's been here for two hundred years.
"Dean, eat something."
He manages to choke down half his beer. Pushes the food around on his plate in a show of eating that doesn't convince anyone.
*
Alastair sings when he comes to find Dean. Sometimes he hums under his breath as he works, and the melody pierces through the pain. He doesn't recognize the lyrics most of the time. Sometimes Alastair sings "Nothing Else Matters," and he takes comfort in the familiar tune. He plays the guitar riff in his head, even as Alastair's straight razor burns into the skin beneath his ear.
*
"Are you singing Metallica?"
"It calms me down."
*
Sometimes Dean catches the glimpse of a shadow out of the corner of his eye. It's not new: he's always seen shadows. This is the first time he's ever started at them, though. The first time it happens he catches himself whirling on the spot, twisting a full 360 degrees to try to find the figure casting the familiar silhouette. He does it every single time, as though he can't help himself.
"What is it?"
"Thought I saw something. Never mind."
"Dean, you're freaking me out a bit. That's the third time you've done that since we got here."
"Yeah, well, can't be too careful."
"You're twitchier than a cat in a firecracker factory."
"It's called taking precautions, Sam."
"No, it's called being sleep-deprived and paranoid. There's nothing there."
"I can see that!" he snaps.
He looks over one last time at the empty corner of the warehouse, swallows a pang of disappointment.
*
He's forgotten how to sleep.
Sam tries to get him to at least lie down. He's been up for nearly three days, and his skin is crawling and the shadows have turned red. Every time he closes his eyes all he sees is red, pulsing and swirling. Sometimes it matches his heartbeat, sometimes it oozes past him until he's sure blood must be dripping past his eyelids.
He paces in circles in their motel room, caged, wishing he were chained down. At least he'd be secure.
"Dean, come on."
He jerks away as Sam's fingers brush against his elbow. "Don't fucking touch me!"
A silent withdrawal, and he wants to scream, lash out, make Sam hit him as hard as he can. He doesn't remember how to sleep, only remembers how to lose consciousness for precious fleeting seconds. He presses his back against the door, slides down it until he's on the floor, head buried in his folded arms. He spends the night there, standing watch and keeping his escape route open. The first rays of dawn find him drifting half-awake, and wishing for the familiar feeling of being ripped apart, rather than the terrifying discomfort of merely existing.
*
Alastair traces beautiful patterns in his skin with his straight razor. They resemble tribal tattoos, all intricate whorls and knots, parallel cuts and slashes. He draws the same pattern every day for fifteen years, starts in the same spot and moves the finely-honed blade with exactly the same precise motions. The process lasts all day, and the cuts burns and sting and the blood trickles beautifully crimson against the white of his skin. So beautiful it takes his breath away.
Alastair likes to run his tongue over the newest ones, to taste the blood on the razor blade. Sometimes he even lets Dean keep his eyelids so that he can choose whether or not to watch.
In the end, he always watches.
*
Dean learns that you can't kill Death.
Lucifer hurls Dean against a tree, and his last thought before he loses consciousness is that Lucifer is a fucking amateur.
*
Alastair locks him alone in a cell for weeks. There's no pain. No light. No one comes, no one speaks. There's no sound, no sensation at all. When he puts his hands out, his fingertips brush against nothing. When Alastair returns to put him on the rack, Dean sobs with relief, curled in a ball at his feet. He buries his head into Alastair's comforting arms, paws desperately at him just to have something, anything to hold onto, and the demon caresses his face, fingernails scraping at Dean's jaw.
"There, my pet. It's over now. You can come back with me. You want that, don't you?"
He nods, sobbing too hard to answer.
Alastair hoists him back onto the rack, and as a reward he takes his sharpest blade and slices cleanly through his ribcage, opening him up with surgical precision. It's hard to scream when your lungs are filling with blood, but Dean manages it anyway. Alastair carves out his heart, holds it, pulsing and quivering in both hands, strokes it with his thumbs as though it was the most precious thing in the world.
Delicately he slices it into bite-sized morsels and feeds it to Dean, who swallows each time with something akin to ecstasy, straining against his bonds. Blood dribbles down his chin, the taste of copper sharp on his tongue, mingling with sulfur and fire and the taste of Alastair's tongue when he leans in to kiss him, as a reward. Alastair strokes his cheek when he's done.
"Be my Valentine?"
When Alastair asks him to step off the platform that day, he's almost forgotten why he should refuse.
*
The door to the roadside diner blows open with a musical chiming of bells, and the subsequent blast of cold air sends shivers running up Dean's spine. He twists in his chair to look at the door—and what sort of sloppy hunter sits where he doesn't have a view of the door?— but there's no one there. Sam is looking at him quizzically, his beer halfway to his mouth. Dean stares resolutely at his pie: apple à la mode, congealing on his plate. He thinks he might be sick.
"You okay?"
"Fine."
An older man in a suit has materialized at the counter and a smiling waitress is serving him a piece of pie. Apple à la mode. Dean is damned sure he wasn't there half a second ago, couldn't possibly have had time to order pie, or anything else. He knows who it is.
Oh, this old thing? It used to be to a pediatrician, but it's not like he needs his meat anymore. Fits like a glove, don't you think?
There's a rushing sound of blood in his ears, and Dean is on his feet in a flash, chair clattering to the floor. Everything has suddenly achieved a crystalline clarity, the room in such sharp focus that it practically hurts his eyes. The figure is gone, no sign of pie or anything else, and now people are staring while he breathes hard, eyes wide, only dimly aware of Sam's voice filtering through the static in his ears, asking what's wrong. His stomach lurches, and he shakes his head, trying to clear it, feeling sweat trickle down his back, flaps what he hopes is a reassuring hand at Sam, escapes into the restroom, away from all the staring eyes.
He's pretty sure that what little food he's managed to eat in the last week is trying to wring itself out of his system. Finally he's able to get the dry-heaving under a semblance of control, reaches up to flush the toilet with a hand that's shaking so hard it looks like he's got a palsy of some kind. He drags himself to the sink, rinses out his mouth, splashes cold water on his face and stays there, fingers digging into the cold porcelain, bracing himself so he doesn't fall over.
He stays there for what feels like hours, but is probably only minutes, trying to remember the mechanics of breathing. Somehow the concept of air flowing in and out of his lungs seems fundamentally alien now.
After a while Sam slips into the bathroom, locks the door behind him. He comes to stand wordlessly beside where Dean is hunched over the sink, places a reassuring hand on the back of his neck. For a moment Dean allows himself to relax under his touch, closing his eyes —Sam's hands are so much like Dad's, large and calloused and strong, and he feels safe, however fleetingly. He pushes away the perverse desire for a smaller hand, one with soft, cruel fingers, tries not to hope to feel fingernails digging into his scalp hard enough to draw blood.
The moment's over, and he forces himself to stand upright, to make his legs work, to make his back hold him up, nods to Sam to show him just how okay he really is.
*
There's blood running down Sam's chin, streaking his face. He looks like every soul that Dean flayed apart on the rack, except that he's not screaming for mercy. He looks angry, defiant, anything but cowed. He screams at them from inside the panic room, rails and raves and rants, and the sound is achingly familiar to Dean's ears.
He wonders just how long it would take for Sam to break.
Bobby is the first to suggest tying down his brother for his own safety. If he notices just how efficient —how practiced— Dean is at putting the restraints in place, he says nothing. Bobby is the one who remembers to slip padding under the leather straps so that Sam won't rub his wrists raw against them as he struggles and screams and convulses. Dean forces another strip of leather between his teeth, watching as it bites into the corners of his mouth, drawing blood. He doesn't have the right equipment up here, he thinks, doesn't quite clamp down on the thought fast enough.
He huddles outside the door of the panic room, hugging his knees, rocking back and forth listening to his brother scream until his throat is scraped raw and bloody. When he closes his eyes, everything pulses in angry shades of red and black.
*
Once, Alastair lets him torture Sam. Places his brother right in front of him, open and inviting, his soul laid bare in all its glory and weakness.
"Go ahead, my love. You're here because of him, after all. Isn't it time he paid for that?"
He sees no reason to hesitate.
*
Sam is examining a length of intestine, while Dean is looking at a human heart. It's nothing he hasn't seen a hundred thousand, a million times before. He looks up, offers Sam a tentative half-smile, and shoves the plastic container toward him.
"Hey... be my Valentine?"
Sam doesn't get it.
*
"You're just not getting deep enough," Alastair confides in a breathless whisper as Dean drives home the knife. "Well, you lack the resources. Reality is just too concrete up here," he says, forgiving his student his clumsy, rudimentary methods.
Up here, there's no way to truly strip the soul and tear it into shreds. He leans in, tastes the blood and the salt on Alastair's lips, feels the demon's borrowed hips jerk against him. He presses harder on the knife, pretends he can't see Alastair's hand moving in that minute, twisting motion.
"How long have you wanted this?" the demon murmurs into his ear. "Were you thinking of me when you screwed that red-headed angel bitch? Wishing she would just be a little rougher with you? Angels aren't built for that, you know. All feather-soft."
He doesn't answer. Doesn't have to. They both know they answer to that.
He isn't surprised when Alastair tells him about the first seal. He thinks he ought to be, plays the part. Demons lie, but Alastair has never lied to him, not once. There's truth in the torture, release there that he's never found anywhere else. Freedom in the simplicity of giving and receiving pain.
"Even if the demons do win, you won't be there to see it." He deliberately turns his back, listening for the tell-tale trickle of water on the concrete floor. He waits, heart hammering painfully in his ribcage, forces himself to count to ten before he lets himself turn around to find the demon standing free of his shackles.
"You should talk to you plumber about the pipes."
Oh, thank God, he thinks, and doesn't even have time to relish the irony in that statement before Alastair has him by the throat.
"Please, just end it," he manages, even as his windpipe gives way under Alastair's crushing grip.
"You'd like that, wouldn't you? Shall I take you back with me?" the demon purrs, running the fingers of his free hand through Dean's hair, petting him as though he was a wayward kitten. "Of all my students, Dean-o, you're my favourite. You know that, don't you? Would you like to come back? Have things go back to the way they were? I'll keep you with me, keep you safe. Would you like that?" his hand shifts to grip the back of Dean's neck, fingers digging cruelly into the nerve bundle there and eliciting a desperate whimper from him.
"Yes, anything, please."
Alastair laughs, deep in his throat. "Good boy."
*
It's all he can do not to go down on his knees before Famine. There's only one thing he wants, and they both know Famine will never give it to him. He hides behind the usual posturing, ignores the voice that asks him why he persists with this charade.
The knowledge that he's not really empty of desire is a cold comfort.
*
Two o'clock in the morning, and he finds himself outside the motel door, key in hand, staring at the lock as though all its mysteries are forever closed to him. He fishes out the forty-ounce bottle of Jack Daniel's that he's taken to keeping in the trunk of the Impala, nestled between the rock salt and his favourite sawed-off, settles on the half-frozen ground and begins methodically making his way through it.
He fills his flask first, just in case. The amber liquid sloshes against the metal, and it feels a bit like offering a libation.
More than halfway through the bottle, and he feels nothing, except maybe a little queasy. He doesn't remember the last time alcohol did anything he wanted it to do. He sits on the asphalt, feeling the cold bite into his legs, but the sensation is a distant one, as though he's insulated from the world by a layer of indifference.
Sam is asleep when he finally manages to make it past the door, just as the sun starts to creep up over the horizon. There's no point trying to sleep. Dead people don't need sleep, and how many times has he died now? He sits on the edge of the bathtub, pulls out his shaving kit. He turns the straight razor over in his hands, letting the harsh light of the fluorescent bulb play along the blade, flashing cold and familiar. It was a present from his father when he turned sixteen, and every time he uses it now his hands shake so hard he wonders that he hasn't managed to slit his own throat. He closes his eyes, tries to remember the pattern that Alistair taught him, the one he learned by heart after studying it every day for fifteen years. It's engraved just under his skin —the unblemished alabaster that's been put back together without so much as a scratch.
Sometimes he wants to kill Castiel for undoing all that hard work.
He figures he can find it again, that he can make it all look the way it's supposed to, if he concentrates hard enough. The first bite of metal is cold and sharp and sends shivers of pleasure through him that are practically spasms.
The next thing he knows he's being slammed so hard into the wall that his head snaps back, colliding painfully with the tile. Stars spark behind his eyelids, and he tries to sink into the pain, except that Sam is shaking him, hard.
"Jesus Christ, Dean! What is wrong with you?"
His head knocks against the wall again, so hard his teeth clamp down over his tongue, and he tastes copper there, trickling over his gums. He has a sudden urge to pull Sam close, to shove his tongue in his brother's mouth, to ask him if he can taste the taint in his blood. If anyone would know, it would be his brother. He's sick and wrong and something inside him is twisted, and all he wants is to have it put right again.
But Sam is already apologizing, pulling him close, prying the razor out of his fingers, running fingers through his hair, murmuring soothing nonsense. He presses his forehead against the sharp edge of Sam's collarbone, wishes Sam would just hurry up and hurt him, already.
*
Nothing in his life has prepared him for Alastair, and the demon knows it. He does things with blade and flame and tongue that have him shuddering and screaming and pleading and begging, and then it starts all over again.
After thirty years of making his every nerve ending sing and shriek, Alastair leans in close, his breath caressing Dean's neck. It's cold and warm and wrong and he wants it more than anything he's ever wanted in his existence.
"Step off the platform, and I will let you do anything you want to me. We'll be together forever, you and I."
If he had eyes left, he would weep with gratitude as Alastair lifts him off the platform and into the warm familiarity of his arms.
*
He can hear his brother and Alastair. Blood has run into both his eyes, sealing them shut. Or maybe Alastair put out his eyes, this time. He doesn't remember. There's pain, but it's always far away now. Dead people don't feel pain.
"Stupid pet tricks," Alastair scoffs, and Dean can't help but agree. There's nothing up here that can rival what they do below. Master and student. Regent and heir.
Sam wants answers, though, and that's what he gets. Dean admires him a little for it. He never really wanted the answer, after all. He's never had the single-minded determination that Sam shares with their father. Of their family, he's always been the broken one.
"Go ahead, send me back. If you can."
He curls into himself, feeling the cold seep in through his pores. Take me with you, he pleads silently as blood drips from his lips to pool on the floor. I don't want to stay here anymore.
"I'm stronger than that now," Sam's voice sends a painful thrill through him. He wonders what it would feel like to give Sam the razor, to see what kind of artistry his baby brother is capable of. "Now I can kill."
There's a terrible scream, and it takes him a long time to realize that it's coming from his own throat.
*
"There's a big difference between dying and not being born, and believe me, we're okay with that!"
Please, Mommy.
It's too late.
*
He begs for help to the empty sky, and isn't surprised when there's no answer. He isn't surprised either when Castiel comes to find him, on his knees in the mud of Bobby's scrap yard. The angel puts a hand on his shoulder, and before he's quite realized what he's doing he's grabbed Castiel's trenchcoat in both hands, clenching his fists so tightly around the rough fabric that his knuckles turn white. The angel is saying something, but he can't hear anything over the buzzing in his head.
"Send me back, Cas. Please, please. You said you pulled me out, and that you could throw me back in. I know you wouldn't lie about that. Please... I can't... not anymore. Please..."
He keeps his eyes tightly shut, thinks he might drown if he has to open them again and look Castiel in the face. Watch those blue eyes bore into him right down to the tainted core of his soul that wants, that longs, that hungers to be back where everything made sense.
"Please Cas... just... send me back."
He isn't surprised, either, when he stays right where he is. There's no end in sight.
*