I don't really remember being human. I mean, none of us do, right? Except for the reason I ended up in Hell in the first place. Except for the murders.

That first guy, I don't really know why I killed him, but I do remember I was thirteen, which in my day was, like, practically a grown-up. I remember feeling so scared of him, then suddenly there was a rock under my hand and I grabbed it and hit him with it as hard as I could. I remember the look of surprise that crossed his face, after I hit him with it the first time, and I knew he wasn't dead, only stunned. Funny thing, I can remember remembering why I was killing him, at the time, but now I can't remember what I remembered. Weird, right? But I do remember how scared I felt, and how that fear drove me to bash his face with the rock over and over until I could see his brains showing.

The second guy was a girl, and I know why I killed her. She saw me kill the other guy. I was so scared that she'd tell everyone what I did and back then they had some really horrible ways to deal with murderers. And humans call us monsters, right? When I stopped hitting the first guy with the rock I looked up and she was there. I looked into her eyes for the longest moment and I could see her fear as the blood dripped off the rock in my hand. I took one step towards her and she just ran, so I ran after her and she was fast, I can tell you, but she got backed up against a cliff edge and she had to stop and she turned to me and she was ready to fight for her life and I was scared she'd win. I still had that rock in my hand so I threw it, and it only caught her shoulder but it was enough to send her over.

I was caught. Cliff edges, they're pretty wide open places. Dozens of people saw me throw the rock, saw her stumble over the edge and plummet to her death. Remember those horrible things they used to do to murderers? Yup. I was so scared but I'd killed two people and I was nearly a grown up and I was shown no mercy. My soul ended up where the souls of murderers go, but not before a slow two-day execution in the hot sun, staked out and broken, crying out in pain and fear with my body left to be torn apart by wild animals, unheeded, unmourned.

In Hell I met Alastair! My only claim to fame! Well, he had a different name back then, and we didn't exactly meet, as such, he picked out the guy next to me from the line-up but I heard his voice and I was, like, standing really close to him for a few seconds. Of course I was too scared at the time to say anything, but hey! Ain't that always the way when you meet someone famous?

So anyway, I was assigned to a guy, called himself Styx. I know, not terribly original, there were dozens of guys took that name back then. He was kinda new, still a human apprentice rather than a demon. I wasn't his first soul I was like his third or fourth, I think. Powerful sonofabitch but not real imaginative. Good solid demon material. I didn't dare speak to him and he never actually said anything to me in all the time we had together, but I like to think the big sigh and eye roll that I got every morning and the tears of abject terror I would give back was, y'know, our thing.

Then one day he never came back. Never knew what happened to him. I hung around, of course, in the literal sense, but his boss never came around either. That whole time, and it was a long time, I was just waiting, chained up, afraid of what might happen next, jumping at every sound, shying away from every approaching shadow, scared to cry out for fear of being found, scared to stay quiet for fear of never being found. I spent a few centuries silently chafing first one wrist then the other, one a day, which let me keep track of time but, well, after a while I lost count and it seemed kinda pointless starting over. I hung there, feeling nothing but fear, for a long time. Millennia. Tens of thousands of years. Hundreds of thousands, I think.

Fun fact, time in Hell is stretched out, so one year up top is around a hundred years in Hell. That's why they tend to measure it using earth time. Hell time, there's just so damn much of it. In human time it was a thousand years, give or take. If I say it felt like ten times longer I'd be lying. It felt a hundred times longer, because it was.

Well, I was pretty terrified I can tell you when someone did find me. I think his name was Gregory? We didn't speak the same language but I was his punchbag for a while. He was actually a demon rather than an apprentice. He'd warm up with his left a few times, never the same twice, and I'd spend the whole time dreading his right because he was a tough sonofabitch and when it came I never saw it coming. After him there were some other guys, I lost track, I'd have a guy torture me for a few decades, a couple of centuries at most, then there'd be nothing for a while, then some other guy would come along.

It was a mix of demons and apprentices. One guy, never knew his name, he was an apprentice, he used me as knife throw target practice for a good long while. Knives had improved a lot since my day by the time he came along, I never saw such hi-tech gear before. Hanging there, knowing the next knife was coming, was second only to the dread I felt after he'd thrown them all. Whenever he walked up to me to retrieve his knives I never knew if he would yank them out, hammer them further in or take hold of the handle and twist until I couldn't scream any more.

Then one day Philip walked into my afterlife.

Philip was such a great guy! He chatted when he tortured me. Okay, the things he said were terrifying, but it was like we had a connection. Sometimes he'd spend a whole day just with me, finessing his knife work. He couldn't have done it without me, he said. And okay, he didn't let me say much but he was always talkative as he sliced me up, always interested in my reactions. He was into fear, not pain. He said my fear was delicious, like fine wine. I'd never had anyone so interested in me. Finally, one day, he asked whether I'd like to hop off the rack and try my hand on someone else. No one had ever asked me that before. I was so scared the first time I just shook my head and he laughed so hard it even made me smile. I mean, demons enjoy their work but they don't usually experience actual joy. I gave Philip joy. That was pretty special. First time I ever smiled in Hell. He never gave up on me, he kept asking and maybe four days later I finally said yes. I'm not ashamed to say I cried when I accepted his offer. I mean, I cried in terror every day my human soul still existed, but still. It was special. He was special.

I was Philip's apprentice for about four hundred hell-years before I became a demon. Philip still scared me, he said most souls transitioned faster and I should try harder, but he stuck with me and I got there in the end. I was his tenth reserve goon for a while. Bodyguard demons train on each other as well as human souls and those guys were real scary, but I stuck it out because of Philip. I felt loyalty towards the guy and I think he appreciated that. After a while Philip got an eleventh and twelfth reserve demon but they were even scarier, looking to climb the ladder any way they could and I was firmly in their sights the whole time. All the while, Philip worked his way up the greasy pole until Queen Lilith caught him making some shady deal and killed him, just like that. The others fought each other for the right to take his place but I fled, terrified of them and of Lilith and of the repercussions of having run away.

Fun fact: Philip was one of the first demons to be killed by a Kurdish demon-killing blade. Yeah, some sorcerer came up with the spell, some Big Boss heard rumors, sent Philip up top to see if it was true. He returned with one of the blades but didn't hand it over to the Queen straight away. Last mistake he ever made.

Before those knives were invented, going up top had always been a there-and-back-again gig. We either smoked out of a meat suit or got exorcised once they learned how to do that. Afterwards? For a hundred earth-years it was a bloodbath up there. The Big Bosses eventually managed to get hold of all the copies of the spell so the humans couldn't make any more blades, but those damn pigstickers still keep cropping up from time to time. Bastards who got their hands on that spell must have made hundreds. And you know what? That sorcerer got into Heaven for coming up with those blades. Heard it on the grapevine. Those knives don't discriminate, y'know. A demon's meat suit dies as well when the demon is stabbed with one of those things. That sorcerer was responsible for hundreds of blades which killed thousands of living meat suits when their demon was offed, and he got a passport to heaven. I killed a couple of people, I wound up with a one-way ticket downwards. Tell me how is that fair?

Anyway, I drifted for a while after Philips death, terrified, in hiding, taking small-time gigs for the most unimportant demons I could find until I was caught by, of all things, a crossroads demon. Kipling was less of a thinker and more of a thug than the average crossroads demon and he was going to kill me but he needed someone fast to do a job that was dirty and bloody and I was available. He let me live afterwards because I was one of the oldest demons in Hell, which he said might come in useful, and my fear of him was his guarantee of my loyalty.

When I joined his gang, Kipling was an obscure, junior crossroads demon who had a boss called Barthamus whose boss was Crowley, King of the Crossroads. When Crowley moved up to become the King of Hell, Barthamus became King of the Crossroads and Kipling started jostling for position. Crowley died and if the rumors flying around Hell at the time were true, the Winchester brothers were strongly implicated. They messed with the King of Hell so badly that the guy sacrificed himself, in some crazy other dimension, for them. How scary is that? It was the first I'd heard of the Winchesters and I decided then and there I never wanted to meet those bastards, ever. Then the King of the Crossroads died too, again because of Sam and Dean Winchester according to the grapevine. Suddenly I found myself in a much bigger gang, uncomfortably high-profile, working as an enforcer for the new King of the Crossroads. I was wondering if there was anywhere far away enough that I could run to when Kipling chose to go one better. That deluded, overambitious thug decided he wanted to be a contender for the Throne of Hell. I don't think I'd ever been so frightened in my entire existence.

Until right now, because the first thing that stupid, arrogant sonofabitch did was piss off Sam Winchester.

I always try to pick the biggest, strongest meat suit I can find when I'm deployed up top. I know they say it's the demon inside that gives the body its strength, but I think a little extra assistance can't hurt. I need all the assistance I can get because we're up against the Winchesters, but all I can get is an average Joe. The Boss thinks if he can hash out the same kind of deal that Crowley had with Sam and Dean Winchester then he'll be in a better position to take over Hell. He got us all to go in mob-handed and kidnap the Winchesters' pet angel, then invited Sam Winchester himself over to talk. Of course as soon as I caught on to what Kipling was up to I tried flee but everything happened so fast I had no opportunity. Kipling didn't trust me any more, hadn't for a while, so he wouldn't let me out of his sight.

So I'm sitting at one of the tables, as far as I can get from that deluded freak Kipling, when the door opens and Sam Winchester walks into Motown's BBQ Meats. Sam is even bigger in person than I was expecting. He's walking into the bar, apparently unarmed and unthreatening and I am paralysed, more terrified than I have ever been, even more than when I was human and alive and thirteen years old and found that rock beneath my hand all those thousands of years ago.

Sam Winchester looks at me. He looks at me. He's calm and determined and he's walking unarmed into a room full of very powerful enemies and he's scared, too, I can see that even if no-one else can, but he's here anyway and he looks at me and suddenly I understand something I never, ever did in my long, long, miserable existence. In that fleeting moment Sam Winchester reveals to me that courage isn't the same as fearlessness. It means being afraid and still doing what you believe you can.

I want to tell him my sad story and ask his forgiveness and run away as far as I can as fast as I can but I'm paralysed with fear and anyway it was just a glance, he's already sized me up and dismissed me from his consideration as though I never existed. To him I am merely Demon Number Five.

My companion, the one who got the biggest meat suit – calls himself Nyx, thinks it's a tough-guy's name, I never bothered telling him that was the name of a goddess back in my day – frisks Sam Winchester then lets him through to see the boss. I turn in my seat, a useless fifth wheel, doing nothing more here than making up the numbers, and even as Sam walks past so his back is to me I know in that moment that I am going to die today. No matter how hard I fight I have no cause, no beliefs; the only thing I have is fear. I'm here because I'm scared of Kipling. I'm going to die today because I'm even more scared of Sam Winchester. But I also think: maybe, after so many eons, I don't have to be afraid of this ending. Maybe going down fighting, at the hands of someone like Sam Winchester, won't be so bad. Maybe demons end up somewhere they can finally rest in peace when they die.

Maybe I'll even get to see Philip again.

One of the demon goons in 14.1 seemed kinda reluctant when I watched the showdown fight with Kipling (if you are interested, he is the demon dispatched with relative ease by Mary Winchester at the beginning of the fight.) I found myself thinking about that, and this fic was the result. A little hero-worship for Sam from the Fifth Demon On The Left, because even demons deserve a backstory.