The hellhound was by his bed. John could smell the sulfur wafting off it, could hear the quiet, guttural growling. John cracked open one eye. The hellhound barred its teeth. Pink saliva drooled over its lips, cascading into a puddle on the tile. John looked up to the clock over the door. Just under two minutes left, then. The hellhound's eyes were blood red and sunken deep into its skull. Its dark fur, thick as steel, was standing needle straight.

John exhaled in a growl of his own. He had made peace with his death. He told Dean everything he knew about Yellow Eyes, but gave him the cliff notes on Sam's involvement in it. Dean didn't need to know those details. They would be irrelevant if Dean could just do what John told him: save Sam or kill him; kill Yellow Eyes or kill Sam.

Dean hadn't liked that. He'd been pissed like John had never seen him before. Dean had demanded an explanation, but John didn't have one. He only knew that Yellow Eyes wanted Sam for some reason—something that had to do with Sam's sudden physic powers, Mary's death—and that dying would be more preferable to anything the demon bastard had planned anyway, regardless of the danger Sam now posed to the kinds of people they spent their life saving.

Dean was pissed and Sam thought he didn't care. Sam had told him to go to hell.

The hellhound breathed on him. It was hot and sticky and it made John's stomach twist. Bile rose up in his throat, and he forced himself to swallow it down.

He was going to die alone.

One minute.

He had failed Mary. He had failed his children. His life's work was destroyed, all for nothing, because Azazel, the monster he'd spent the last twenty years tracking down, offered him a deal he couldn't refuse: his life for Dean's.

Dean was young, a good hunter, and Sam's older brother. If there was anyone who would do anything for Sam, it was Dean. Dean didn't deserve to die.

John, though…

He closed his eyes.

Thirty seconds.

No…

No.

If he was going to die, even in a hospital, with tubes in his arms and down his nose and up his urethra, wearing a flimsy dress that showed his bare ass, he was going to die as a hunter. He was going to die facing his enemy head on.

John opened his eyes. The hellhound leered over, tongue hanging lazily out of its mouth. It put its tongue against John's cheek. It felt like fiery sandpaper. It dragged it across John's face, over his cheek towards the bridge of his nose, scratching every millimeter, sending pinpricks of fire across his skin.

Ten seconds…

In his last moments, John wished many, conflicting things. He wished he could have avenged Mary. He wished he had never discovered this secret world of monsters and demons and could have just lived a normal life as a widower and be left to rot in ignorance. He wished he had been a better father to his two sons. He should have protected them. He should have taken care of them. Instead, he left it to Dean to take care of himself and his baby brother, when the boy was still just a baby himself, while he was out either drunk or hunting because he put the needs of others before his own children.

It had to be done. His boys were strong. Stronger than most, and that's why it fell to them to be protectors, why John had to leave his boys alone in skeevy motel rooms for days at a time; because his boys would be okay. The people out in the world, people that didn't know about the supernatural creatures that lurked in the night wouldn't. John had to do what he did. That didn't mean he enjoyed it.

His boys deserved better than him. Even if he hadn't sold his soul, he still deserved to go to Hell, for the things he did to his boys, for getting Mister Harvelle killed, leaving Ellen widowed and his kid without a father, for abusing Bobby Singer's kindness and leaving him as John's go to stop for free babysitting.

In his last seconds, facing his death, he acknowledged his mistakes and accepted the punishment that came with them.

He was going to die, but Dean was going to live and Dean and Sam could finish the work he started: they could defeat Yellow Eyes and avenge their mother; keep the family business going.

Three seconds…

The hellhound growled. John felt its teeth scrap against his skin and test its grip, pinching.

Two seconds…

The heart monitor beside his bed began to beep incessantly. John's chest ached and he couldn't scream, the pain paralyzing him. The world in front of him grew blurry. Shapes disappeared entirely and he was left only with muted colors.

One second.

"Come on already, you son of a bitch," John said.

The hellhound made the first bite and John screamed

Hell was not fire and brimstone, half goat hybrids with pitchforks. It was dark, and deep, and never ending, like sinking to the bottom of the ocean. Satan did not push you off a cliff into a pool of fire. Rather, demons strung you up like pieces of meat onto metal racks and they cut off body parts and cut in holes; they stuck their fingers into those holes and pulled out nerve endings, muscle, organs, stuffed you full of spiders and sulfur and sewed you back up and then with a snap of their fingers, you would be whole again and for a brief instance the pain would be gone and you could sigh with relief.

Alastair swirled his knife through his fingers and hummed. "What'll it be, Johnnie boy?" he asked. He bent down and placed the hilt of the blade in John's fingers, wrapped them around it. The blade was sticky with his hot blood and heavy. "All you gotta do is trade me places, huh? I'll let you off if you play teacher."

"Go fuck yourself," John said in between heavy breaths. He was not a demon. He was better than these black eyed sons of bitches. He knew what would happen if he picked up that blade; the pain might end, but he would lose his humanity in the process. The pain was his last reminder that he was not demonic, he was human, just like everyone else strung up screaming. His suffering kept him human.

The worst part was discovering that demons had been human once. His mind flashed back to every black eyed bitch he had ever exorcised. The smoke that raced out of the mouth and nose of the poor possessed bastard was the twisted remnants of a tortured, human soul. Someone who had once been in a similar position John had been; desperate, helpless, willingly to do anything to make things right, even sell his soul.

A weak, human soul. A soul that hadn't been able to resist and say no.

John didn't want to become smoke.

Alastair asked him every day. He twisted the blade in John's stomach, screw driving it in and whispering in his ear, "Do you want to get off, Johnnie? Do you want to hold the blade?"

Everyday John would tell him one of the many variants of no he picked up. He'd been a Marine once, he had a very colorful vocabulary. John lost track of time. Days bleed into each other, until there was no cohesion, just pain and short bursts of peace. Sometimes he forgot that there was a time where he was alive, that he wasn't always tied to this metal rack. There was a time when he was alive, and on Earth. A time when there had been more than this constant darkness and pain. He had a family. He was a father.

He couldn't remember what his sons looked like and he cried.

"All you have to do," Alastair said, wiping the tears away with his thumb, dancing his fingertips across John's eyelids, "is say yes."

Between his choked sobs, John spat out, "Take that yes and ram it up your ass."

It went on.

He forgot his name.

Alastair asked again. "I'll tell you if you say yes. Don't you want to remember?"

He was resolute, though. The pain got worse, but he didn't break. Alastair dug hooks into his shoulders and the meat of thighs, inches away from his genitals and he lit them on fire, but John never broke.

It was almost anticlimactic. After so much time that he forgot his name and the faces of his sons and the smell of his wife, a light broke through the blackness. Alastair looked up and hissed before smoking away.

John remembered. He reached, and then he was free.

A woman in a dark suit with a clean bun and a mean expression walked towards him.

"Do we have a deal?" she asked, her voice every bit as stern as her face.

"Deal," he said, clasping her hand in his own.