What the Abyss Saw… when it looked into Dean Winchester

Dean is sixteen years old, looking down from the second-story bedroom window of a massive old farmhouse (Sonny's Home For Boys), looking through the trees at a long black shape with taillights, as familiar to him as the backs of his hands, the backs of his eyelids.

"So if you want, I'll stick my neck out for you and I'll fight for you to stay."

Dean is sixteen years old. Watching Sammy hanging out the back passenger window to play with a model fighter jet – looks like a Tomcat from here. He's a little kid again in his excitement because Dad bought him a new toy. Dad (never) buys (it's too expensive) new (we don't have the money) toys (for nonessentials, Dean, you know that!).

Not just any toy, either. Because evidently Sammy's latest I-want-to-be-when-I-grow-up has lasted through the months they've been apart. Air force pilot. Close enough to Dad's once-a-Marine-semper-fi that it isn't immediately reviled and discarded as a far second to what they obviously will become-

Hunters. Soldiers in an unseen, unsung war.

"You can stay here as long as you want…"

No, I can't.

"When you look in the mirror, you want the guy looking back at you to be his own man."

Yeah, well, I agree with that…

And Dean leaves the farm behind him like a wonderful puzzling dream. Wrestling trophies and guitar lessons, kissing a pretty girl who actually likes him as if he isn't going anywhere, and wearing a tie to the school dance.

(In the future, when he wears a tie to go with his undercover-fake FBI-suits/costumes, he remembers that Sonny taught him how to tie the knot. And he never forgets the stupid nickname. D-dog.)

Gotta take care of Sammy. An order is an order.

Because if Dean doesn't go, doesn't let Dad teach and train and bully him into becoming an obedient trustworthy soldier, he's going to do it with Sam.

And Dean can do it. He can deal with a hundred and one applications of rock salt. Holy water, and holy oil. Reading Latin and Gaelic runes and between the lines of old newspaper stories. He can deal with dangling himself as bait at a days- or months- or years-old murder scene to see what sort of fugly presents itself for confession-by-repeat-assault.

But not Sammy, who wants to fly, someday.

And if he can't, Dean will have to be there to drive him to the ER to set broken bones. On the handlebars of his bike, if necessary.

Dean is thirty years old, and embarrassingly relieved when his soul opens his eyes and he is no longer strung up in an endless abyss with hooks through his flesh and around his bones to stretch him out into nothingness.

Rather, he shares a small cell – stone walls splashed red with firelight and more – with a stench that deserves personification, and Alastair.

Alastair isn't the only one who takes Dean apart, over and over in this interminable torture. And Dean becomes acquainted with the sight of his own organs, glistening and quivering as they're separated and distanced from their homes inside of him. He becomes familiar with the smell of his own bones, roasting in blood over the grill covering the fire. The taste of it all, raw or charred, juicy or crunchy or anything in-between as it's crammed down his throat. He knows each note in the whole range of sound his screams can reach, intimately.

But Alastair is the most methodical. Even though screams for mercy or death (again? is that possible?) don't affect any of the demons save to amuse them, Alastair cannot be hurried with taunts like some of the others. He doesn't ever lose control, doesn't ever slip on the instruments coated with Dean's blood and viscera. Doesn't even raise his voice. Describes what he's doing, why he's doing it, what he expects from Dean.

Suck it up, soldier. The only way out is through.

It's almost familiar.

For the first thirty hell-years, Dean reminds himself, this is for Sammy, in a mantra of self-defense.

Wherever his brother went when he left Dean's arms in the dusty street of Cold Oak, it was someplace else. He isn't here, now, and that's enough.

Because if Dean hadn't gone, they'd have done this with Sammy. And Dean can take it…

Dean is eighteen years old, seated on the crooked porch of an abandoned cabin, the pearl-handled Colt and the Beretta and the S&W field-stripped to their major components on the bench beside him as he handles bore brush and cotton patches, lube and flannel luster rags without looking. His gaze is focused on his father in the dusty yard in front of the cabin. Sweat slides down his back even in the shade, down the sides of his father's grizzled face, down the points of Sammy's hair in front of his ears and overhanging his eyes.

He tenses, watching Dad catch and twist Sammy's limbs – he might be tall someday, but he's skinnier than Dean ever was at the same age. Still shorter and always younger, and Dean can't help flinching as Sammy's young, skinny body flips over to slam into the ground in a cloud of dust.

For the ninth time.

He can't hear the words Dad growls down at his little brother, but he doesn't have to. He's heard them all before. You have to master this, it can save your life or someone else's. Suck it up, soldier, a Winchester never gives up.

Dean trusts that, believes that. Dean at fourteen had bounced off the dust, coming up ready for another try on his own. Willingly pitting himself against his father's standards, stubborn and proud enough to demand another go til he conquered whatever task was set out for him. There was a thrill there he loved, accomplishment that probably was colored by his father's approval, brief though it was before they moved on to another harder aspect of training.

But Sammy.

Maybe he doesn't want to be a pilot anymore, maybe he doesn't know what he wants to be – or he just doesn't say, anymore – but he knows what he doesn't want.

That never mattered to their father. Sammy doesn't bounce up covered with bruises and dust, grinning and mouthy. He stays down, glowering and resisting – provoking, not cooperating, and John Winchester's temper is fraying. They should have been done an hour ago, and it isn't because Sammy is weak or stupid that they're not. It's because both of them refuse to give in to the other. Sammy refuses to absorb, to improve, and their father refuses to accept that.

Dean is eighteen and sitting on the porch of an abandoned cabin along the Appalachian Trail somewhere, and his hands smell of oil and solvent and the rest of him smells like sweat. He stands up as his father grips Sam's arm in a move that has nothing to do with demonstrating self-defense techniques.

Dad. Hey, Dad, wait a minute. I think I know what the problem is – can I take over for a minute?

John Winchester glares through sweat-dampened hair and Dean can smell his desire for half a bottle of whiskey and his journal.

Fine. But just so you know… You make sure he learns it, or I will.

Dean is five years old going on six, when he begins to teach Sammy. He teaches Sammy everything he needs to know about life, and so much more than isn't essential. How to sit up. How to stand up for himself. How to drink milk from a lidless cup, and how to drink like a man. How to hide, and how to find.

Sometimes Sammy understands that he's being given a fishing pole and a can of bait and directions to the lake, instead of breaded catfish in a frying pan – and sometimes he doesn't.

Dean does it anyway.

You do it, or I will.

Dean is twenty-eight years old, waking up in hospital to the relief that he's been the one in the coma following the catastrophic car accident. And Sammy is fine, and Dad's only sporting scabs and bruises and a sling.

Dad smiles and leans to whisper in his ear. I couldn't, so you have to. Save Sammy – or save everyone else from him.

The second option isn't to be contemplated long. Therefore, failure at the first option, isn't an option.

Two steps forward, one step back. But Dean's a Winchester, proud and stubborn even if it comes out cocky.

Dean is three and a half months past his thirtieth birthday, and dying for the first time.

The agony of being ripped apart the first time doesn't last long. Death interrupts.

When he opens his eyes to find himself suspended in the abyss, hooks torn through his flesh and wedged around his bones, chains taut and attached to nothing he can see, he doesn't understand.

Blood and darkness and electricity exploding in every nerve and his own screams echoing across the vastness from every direction at once.

But it's his soul in hell, not his body. How can a person experience pain without a body?

Then he comprehends what he glimpsed for the first time outside a burning home in Lawrence, Kansas. The soul feels even more keenly than the body. And it cannot be destroyed, for something (hope) knits it back together, again and again.

Dean is thirty years and three months old. For the last thirty more in hell-years, Alastair has been whispering in his ear. A choice. An option.

I can peel your skin from your flesh, and your flesh from your bones, and pick your bones apart one by one, or…

I can roast your muscles an inch at a time, or…

I can dice your liver and kidneys in front of you and stuff them back inside like a Thanksgiving turkey, or…

The same hollow drawl every time. I really don't care either way, it just occurred to me it might be interesting if we did something new…

Go screw yourself. In various colorful words and phrases, Dean tells him the same thing over and over, day after day til he's certain that ingenuity has failed him and he's approaching repetitive.

One day Dean opens his eyes to find he's in a double cell. First he thinks it's a mirror, the reflection of himself, a naked soul chained to a rack, filthy and bloody, burned and half-crazed with pain and panic and he's going to have to watch what they're doing to him from a new angle.

Only it's not a mirror. It's a stranger-soul.

Alastair appears, followed by one of the other demons. Sometimes Alastair watches as someone else dismembers Dean – this time he watches his companion begin to dismember the stranger.

A cut at his collarbone. Almost like an autopsy. The stranger screams and writhes and the demon dances and laughs, gesturing threateningly with the knife, teasing with little cuts and nicks before plunging the blade between ribs and beginning to saw in exaggerated motion. (This is why Dean almost appreciates Alastair's dispassionate method of torture.)

Dean is hoarse from smoke and screaming but he can't watch silently. He can't look away. He can't not threaten rage and retribution of his own, even though he's helpless against the sadistic torturer.

Alastair looms and Dean flinches back, distracted from the neighboring carnage, though Alastair's hands are empty.

He drones in Dean's ear. This one was what you people call a serial killer. He preferred tall, slender blondes. He met them on dating sites on the internet, and charmed them. He dated them, champagne and roses and everything. He poisoned them with insecticide, playing the role of caregiver. And then there was the basement. He kept them chained and naked, and sometimes he drugged their food and sometimes he turned a garden hose on them and sometimes he brought a box-cutter-

Dean wrenches away, but it doesn't stop him hearing.

He pulled out their lovely blonde hair by the roots. He pulled out other things too, before he dumped the bodies…

How many people had made deals like his, for the sake of someone else's life or health or happiness? How many people suffered in hell who hadn't earned their place through heinous deeds? Less than one percent?

The screams of the stranger burn away to guttural sounds of strangulation – though the demons' hands are nowhere near the man's throat.

You do it, Alastair whispers. Or we will.

Dean is four years old, only just, curled up on the couch watching Scooby-Doo. His mom hangs up the telephone in the kitchen and appears in the doorway, Sammy a sleeping blanket-wrapped bundle in the crook of her elbow. He's trying to make a tooth, Dean was told, that's why he's too fussy to be left in the crib for his nap. He needs his mother to hold him…

That was your dad, she says, swaying to keep baby brother asleep. He's going to be here any minute. How 'bout you hop up from there and get your shoes on and use the bathroom so you can be ready to go when he gets here?

Dean lingers, wanting to see which human the monster turns out to be when the gang unmasks him or her. Where's he taking me?

His mom gives him a smile he'll never forget. It'll be a surprise.

Dean is twenty-seven-and-a-half when he discovers, it's easier to be the one flat on your back on a dusty concrete floor in the moldy wing of an abandoned asylum, with rock salt burrowing and burning under your skin and an empty pistol clicking in your face, than to be the one struggling with ghost-fueled rage, pointing the weapon and pulling the trigger.

He knows because he wishes it had been the other way around, that he could have protected Sammy from possession that day, and the guilt of his actions in the days following.

Dean is thirty years and three months old, plus thirty hell-years, and he's free before he knows he's surrendered, and said yes.

His skin is intact. There's a scalpel in his hand, and a victim on the rack before him.

He wonders if his eyes are black.

Alastair's instructions drone in his ear, and Dean leans forward to whisper in the man's ear.

Confess…

The man sweats from every pore. Yes, I did it! I touched them, it felt good, I did it again and again! Fourteen, they said at my trial, but it was more! Fear leaks from him and his eyes roll in terror, and Dean swallows his gorge.

He lays the blade to sweating, hairy skin, and makes the first cut.

Dean learns a variety of instruments (weapons) and methods. He is clinical in his obedience to Alastair's instructions, following orders to each edge of each letter…

But no further. And he never taunts, or mocks, or ridicules. He never apologizes, but he meets every gaze, and both of them know, the torture is deserved.

You do it, or we will.

Is it harder to suffer, or to inflict suffering? Is he saving these souls from becoming torturers themselves, or punishing them for being just that, in life?

Dean never, to his knowledge, makes a demon.

Dean is thirty years and four months old, plus forty hell-years, and he's topside again. Free before he knows it. Alone for the first time since he was strung in the abyss…

He looks into the mirror at an abandoned fill-station, and his eyes are green.

You want the guy looking back at you to be his own man…

Dean is thirty-one years old and he realizes, how Machiavellian everyone truly is, at their core. Everyone believes, deep down, that some ends truly justify any means. They just want to be the ones in control of those choices, that's all, and no one trusts anyone else to choose.

He's not ashamed to admit that he subscribes, sometimes. In their line of work, the unexpected and the impossible sometimes require compromise and sacrifice.

And it's usually, voluntary compromise and sacrifice on his part. On their part, occasionally.

"You happen to be the most qualified interrogator we've got."

Seven angels have been murdered.

"We have Alastair. But he won't talk. Alastair's will is very strong… We've arrived at an impasse. You're our best hope."

"You can't ask me to do this."

Dean stands at a filthy steel door with a small square window, staring at the body Alastair is in.

"Not this."

Old Enochian trap, a vertical frame in the shape of a star of David that body is chained to. And what they're asking isn't for Dean to get off the rack to begin the torture. They're asking him to get back on and sacrifice himself.

"This is too much to ask," says the angel on Dean's shoulder. "But we have to ask it."

"You open that door and ask me to walk through it, you will not like what walks back out." Dean knows how torture changes a man. Especially when you're the one inflicting it.

"For what it's worth… I would give anything not to have you do this." The angel thinks he knows what he's asking Dean to do.

Dean knows the other angel, the darker one, truly understands what he's doing. It's not so much about what Dean is going to do in that room. It's more about, Dean is going to be in that room. He closes his eyes, understanding that his angel does not understand, and that is all right. The other one does; and Alastair will.

And Alastair does.

His first reaction is to sing a love song. Ginger and Fred, together again. The reunion tour. Dancing cheek to cheek.

Dean cannot hurt him enough to make him offer the information from pain or fear. That was the problem with demons, usually – they didn't fear pain, or death. They knew what was on the other side, they'd been there before and escaped it. You had to find another kind of leverage. Motivation.

Compromise.

Alastair was stubborn as a mule, but the angels owned him, in that trap. They just couldn't drive him, and the stick would never work.

They need a carrot.

This is what Dean understands that Castiel doesn't. He's not the stick.

Dean is the carrot. He's meant to let Alastair take bite after bite of him in the hopes that the mule will grow too eager, will allow the distraction, will spill the information in gloating and psychologically becoming the torturer, once again, no matter their relative positions, the trap and the tools.

But Dean is not meant to know he's the carrot. Alastair isn't meant to know. So Dean masquerades as the stick, wielding blade and salt and holy water.

And he lets Alastair take bite after bite.

Until it's almost a relief to turn and see that Alastair has gotten free of the rack somehow. Broken trap. Dean's turn, and he deserves the beating.

He doesn't even fight.

"Did I break the first seal? Did I start all this?"

"And the righteous man who begins it is the only one who can finish it…"

It wasn't four months, you know.

It was four months up here, but down there… I don't know. Time's different. It was more like forty years.

They, uh. They sliced and carved and tore at me in ways that you… until there was nothing left.

No endurance, no sarcasm, no defense. No place to hide.

And then, suddenly… I would be whole again… like magic… just so they could start in all over. And Alastair… at the end of every day… every one…

10,950 days.

He would come over. And he would make me an offer to take me off the rack… if I put souls on… if I started the torturing. And every day, I told him to stick it where the sun shines. For thirty years, I told him.

10,950 days. Give or take.

But then I couldn't do it any more, Sammy. I couldn't. And I got off that rack. God help me, I got right off it…

Panic grips Dean to disclose the memory.

The noises that would make your ears bleed. Literally.

Everyone else's misery, surrounding you, isolating you, with no surcease. The smells, the rough feel of the rack, wood and metal, filthy and blood-soaked and charred, and words spill from him like blood from a suddenly-slit vein.

And I started ripping them apart. I lost count of how many souls. The – the things that I did to them…

The heat dried the tears. No moisture gathered or leaked to cleanse even that small part, to blur sight and wash some emotion away.

How I feel… this… inside me…

I wish I couldn't feel anything, Sammy. I wish I couldn't feel a damn thing.

Be careful what you wish for…

Two months after Dean's thirty-sixth birthday, he looks into the eyes of his reflection and sees black.

It's freedom. The absence of a restraining conscience. For once he can drink and drink and keep drinking without considering that he shouldn't. There aren't any consequences for anyone that he cares about, after all. He can punch a douche-bag ex-boyfriend of a pretty blonde barmaid and not worry about stopping… he stops when he just doesn't feel like swinging anymore.

"Do you want to spike a civilian, or someone who has it coming?"

Winchesters are stubborn, and Dean has never wanted to obey anyone but his father. He figures Crowley should have expected such behavior from him, rather than cooperation. It was liberating to resist the training of the king of hell. It made him feel closer to Sammy.

Demons lie, but Dean doesn't have to. Doesn't have to lie to protect anyone. The truth does that for him, now.

"The kind of guy who sleeps with every skank in every small-town dive that he passes through…"

And Anne-Marie is protected from him.

"Les. I'm going to say something to you, and I need you to really listen to me. You're a loser. Loser, with a capital L. Rhymes with you suck."

Watch this.

Yeah, I'd much rather stab a soul-selling would-be murderer who's also too stupid to alibi himself after he's contracted his wife's death.

That saves two lives, if you think about it. Mindy the cheating wife lives, and since Dean reneged on Hell's deal, Lester's soul is free to go… elsewhere. No torture in Hell for him. Dean has met lots of douche-bags who deserve that more, anyway.

And Crowley doesn't know him like Sam does. Can't see past the hard-partying façade to anything Dean still has to protect – since he's surrounded by demons, these days.

"Lifelong torture turns you into something like that…"

Something like those feral twins, trapped in the walls and foundation of their grandfather's house, unable to make meaningful connections with the strangers who came after their grandfather had been punished… unable to stop themselves from lashing out in their pain until there was nothing for it – they had to be put down.

"You were in hell, Dean. Look, maybe you did what you did there, but you're not them. They were barely human."

"Well, you're right. I wasn't like them. I was worse. They were animals, defending their territory. Me… I did it for the sheer pleasure of it."

"What?"

"I enjoyed it, Sam."

This isn't coming out right.

"They took me off the rack, and I tortured souls, and I liked it."

Maybe like isn't the right word. There was satisfaction in punishing evil, even of the human kind, and comfort and relief in knowing, each and every one of those sonsabitches deserved it, no question. There weren't any innocents in hell.

"All those years, all that pain… finally getting to deal some out yourself. I didn't care who they put in front of them. Because that f- that pain I felt… it just slipped away."

It was a little like, joining Dad on a hunt instead of being left behind. There was control, there was choice – even if it was an illusion.

"No matter how many people I save, I can't change that. I can't fill this hole. Not ever."

Dean is thirty-six-and-a-half, and he's a demon.

Demons lie, but to Dean, the truth is hilarious. Impulse is everything. Fighting is a relief and he still kills those who deserve it. Inflicts a more subtle verbal torture on those who don't – Anne-Marie, and Cole Trenton, but ultimately it can't last.

Because Dean is a demon, and hunters kill demons. He isn't a hunter anymore, exactly – and he can't kill himself. He's tried, with the First Blade. Maybe nothing can kill him, but.

If anything does, Sammy will go after whatever it is for retribution.

Dean doesn't examine any of his impulses anymore, but he knows the edges Sammy is approaching to find him, and he doesn't run so hard, or hide so thoroughly. He leaves an open bar tab. He lets Crowley turn him over without so much as yanking on the spelled cuffs.

Dean doesn't want to be cured. Maybe if he was human, he would – but then, he wouldn't need it. Demon-Dean doesn't want this blessed blood.

(Remember when Sam used to chug cursed demon blood? Isn't it ironic, doncha think?)

He doesn't want these feelings. The restraint and conviction of conscience.

(Sammy should understand what it means to feel invincible. He was a demon once, too, and refused to let Dean and Bobby save him.)

Dean drowns in his own sweat and boils in his own blood and last time he felt like this Alastair failed to make a demon out of him. It's downright hilarious that Crowley succeeded where Alastair couldn't.

Crowley was a helluva lot more fun. And couldn't see further than the image Dean projected. He never took Dean apart. He believed the charisma.

Damn the Mark.

But then Dean is free.

He doesn't leave the Bunker because around and round and round we go. He can't kill himself. He can't make Sammy stop trying to recover him. It'll be another month or six, and they're right back here again going through the same motions.

Maybe only Sammy can stop him – and then his little brother won't be hunting whatever big bad was responsible for Dean's death. Because it's his own fault. Dean's own fault.

The bunker has an armory. It has an arsenal. But Dean goes for the kitchen, and when his impulse is to pick up a hammer (bruises and broken bones) rather than a cleaver (missing fingers and slashed arteries and spilling viscera) he doesn't examine the impulse.

Because fighting is a relief, but he only kills those who deserve it.

And around and round and round we go through the green-tiled hallways, but there's more talking than actual fighting, and the angel behind Dean's shoulder is stronger than the diluted demon blood in his veins.

And he's going to feel again. He's going to shoulder the guilt of the whole thing again and soldier on, because that's what Winchesters do. They don't give up; they finish the job.

(Take your brother. Watch out for Sammy.)

Because maybe the righteous man spills blood in hell, and maybe Winchesters share some Machivellian leanings with demons, but.

The family job. Saving people, killing things. We do it, because no one else will. And normal, and freedom, is a price paid willingly. And love can redeem anyone from the abyss.

When you look in the mirror, you want the guy looking back at you to be his own man.

And he is. The righteous man of heaven and hell, the dutiful Winchester soldier, the complicated but loving brother. The hero…

And the abyss releases its claim, and looks away.