Proverbs of Hell
Title: Proverbs of Hell
Rating: PG-13
Words: 2,103
Spoilers: Up to the Purgatory flashbacks.
Warnings: Language, nasty hell flashbacks, brief descriptions of torture/mutilation.
Summary: Sometimes Dean isn't quite Dean in Purgatory. Or: how Benny found out about Sam (and Alastair). For caput_mortuum's prompt over at lacerta's Nice Things for Dean meme (my definition of "nice things" might be...a little twisted?).
Neurotic author's notes: Fits in with " The Heart's Bleed Longest," but stands alone just fine. I kind of love writing in Benny's voice? Anyways, title is William Blake's and the cut text is from Leonard Cohen's "Sisters of Mercy."
It’s been a very long time since anything has taken Benny by surprise. There’s not much left he hasn’t seen or heard of, but every once and a while, when they were looking for the angel, Dean would do it-would illicit from Benny naked, genuine shock. And not in his competence-the boy had old school American hunter written all over him, and he came from good stock-nor his devotion to the angel (that was, in Benny’s estimation, another matter entirely).
No, sometimes, when Dean’s blood’s up and there’s something he’s trying to kill, trying to pull information from, something will happen, and Benny will remember being very small, seven, maybe eight, and remorselessly shooting down a squirrel with his older brother’s gun, and his father had raised his eyebrows and coed, “Goddamn, Benny-boy, the devil come into you?” and his mother had laughed from her perch on the porch and said some boys were born with the devil in them.
Funny, that.
At any rate, Benny didn’t want to think too hard about the devil and Dean Winchester, and he wasn’t in the habit of prying, but sometimes-sometimes Dean’s jaw was set and his eyes were glazed, and then he’d be tugging intestines out like a magician’s never-ending rope, slitting skin in torturous intervals, gently extracting hearts, still thumping weakly, from a mess of broken ribs and skewered organs. Benny is a man who knows monsters, and he does not scare easy, but when Dean digs three fingers into a bone deep wound on a thigh, drags his bloody fingers over his lips-there’s a line. He doesn’t care how badly he wants to leave, and he doesn’t care how badly Dean wants to find his angel. There’s a fucking line.
More unsettling still, Dean rarely has clear memories of these interrogations, and will come back to himself in stages, blink wonderingly at the gore that coats his fingers, shake his head and grimace, occasionally vomit. He deflects questions. Benny doesn’t pry. His job is survival, after all, and Dean is a damn good man to have on his side.
Survival, he thinks, as Dean dry-heaves into the mud, frantically wiping his bloody hands on his pants, survival. Not head-shrinking.
But that night, after a shaky, exhausted Dean passes out against a tree, wrung out and unable to even protest when Benny offers to take first watch, he finds himself wondering. Studying that face, pinched and troubled even in sleep, with only a day or two’s stubble roughing up his jaw (Dean insistently shaved with a knife and water-he couldn’t explain why he did it, only that he needed to, and Benny allowed him his indulgences-he was, after all, a human in the no man’s land, and if a quick, dirty attempt at shaving made him feel better, that was his business). Dean was a young man, self-contained and self-possessed, savagely intelligent, quick on his feet. Very clearly a product of the kind of rough-and-ready down-home hunters who’d emerged around the time Benny died-he can remember someone drunkenly lamenting the end of the days of the gentleman hunter.
But Dean is an enigma, for the most part, brothers in arms though they may be. He calls in his sleep, but in the waking hours his focus is singular: survive, find the angel, get gone. He’s saved Benny more than once, and can be, in moments of panic, pain, or fear, astonishingly, shockingly gentle.
Benny has been drifting, lost in thought, and he jerks in surprise when Dean lets out a low moan, and then a kind of keening noise that might be a whimper. Benny tenses, waits to see if this will pass or if he’ll have to wake Dean before he starts attracting undue attention, when Dean lets out a shaky, piteous cry of “Sam?”
Something inside Benny snaps, and maybe it’s just spite or fear or exhaustion, but he reaches over and jostles Dean’s shoulder until he wakes, mumbling, “Stop it, Sammy,” before coming to full awareness.
Dean blinks at him, sits up, hugs his knees. He glances around, apparently surmises why Benny woke him and accepts it.
“Who’s Sam, anyways?” asks Benny, like he’s continuing a previous conversation, even though they’ve never once talked about the things Dean shouts in his sleep.
Dean doesn’t answer, just tucks his chin over his knees and squints at the flickering embers of their fire. He looks like a child, he looks young and lost and shy, and Benny knows better than to keep going, and yet-
“He the one who taught you to pull a heart out like that?”
It’s like Dean’s been shocked-he flinches, his whole body, uncurls, stares at Benny in naked horror, appalled. “No,” he snarls, with a dangerous edge to his voice, and Benny lets it go.
:::
Later, after they’ve found the angel, after Dean has lost himself and threatened to skin Benny alive, after he’s sobbed and shouted into the angel’s lapels and the angel has, in turn, revealed to Benny just how much of the devil was in Dean Winchester-and to think Benny’s been slaughtering his way through Purgatory with the righteous man!-he’s sitting with Dean, propped up against another ancient tree, watching another dying fire. The angel is sitting opposite them, his hooded eyes fixed on the forest behind them.
Dean, who had a few hours earlier taken a spectacular blow to the head, is punchy and still bleeding sluggishly from his temple, the scrap of the angel’s filthy trench coat that had served as a makeshift bandage brown with dirty, drying blood. “Cas,” he says, shakily, and when the angel doesn’t reply he says “Cas” again with enough urgency to merit the angel’s full attention.
“What-what d’you think Sammy’s doing, right now?” he asks, picking at his shredded, mud-crusted pant hem.
“I don’t know, Dean,” says the angel, sounding sincerely sorry, and Dean nods, swallows convulsively, fixes his eyes on the ground.
Then, after a moment, he looks to Benny and says, “Sam’s my brother.” Benny nods, long having accepted that information about Dean-the-unlikely-righteous-man will come in incomplete pieces. “And,” says Dean pointedly, “he’s not that one who taught me how t’kill anybody. I was the one taught him.”
“Yeah?” says Benny, grinning, darkly amused by the idea of Dean in his Sunday best, austerely talking a small boy through the finer points of severing a man’s throat. “You teach him how to pull the hearts, then?”
Dean looks almost as disgusted as he did the first time, and then his face crumples and for a queasy moment, Benny is sure he’s going to cry. He doesn’t, though, merely looks back at the ground and mutters, “That wasn’t Sam. Sam never-even when he-that was Alastair.”
Benny watches Dean, acutely aware that the angel is doing the same, as Dean digs a little hole in the ground with his finger, fills it back in with the displaced dirt. “He was, was this demon.” Dean swallows again, maybe gulps, and Benny wants to tell him to stop, but then Dean’s talking fast and breathing fast and confessing to the ground like dying man. “And he, he taught me how to-to-all kinds of horrible shit, you know, and I did it, I didn’t want to, or I don’t think I did, he said I did, said I was a natural”-he gives a little shudder-“and I got good, man, Jesus, I got good. And when I-when I did something he’d-he’d-to me, when I, like with the ears, or the intestines-he always…” Dean stops for a moment, digs his fingers further into the ground. Benny looks at the angel, whose eyes are fixed firmly on Dean’s face, his brow furrowed. Dean swallows audibly. “He always laughed,” he croaked, “you know, because I-I was doin’ stuff he taught me. Such a good-good pupil, he’d say, daddy’s good-” He stops, hides his face. Blood inches down the side of his face. Benny moves a little closer, wants to place a bracing arm on Dean’s shoulder, doesn’t know how it will be received. He hasn’t had the time-or, if he’s honest, inclination-to think about the full implications of Dean’s being the righteous man in Hell. He and the angel share an unreadable look.
“But when I came up with something new,” says Dean, softly, into his knees, drawing both Benny and the angel’s attention back to him immediately, “then he’d be-he’d be-he promised me he’d tell me my name one day, every day, if I did good. The thing with the-esophagus”-Benny shudders, remembering-“that was me, yeah, I remember he was real-he though I--did real good, he said, I did real good, and I said, ‘Good enough?’ and he said ‘Not yet’ and then he-” Dean stops, buries his face, lets out a shuddery breath.
“Dean,” says the angel lowly, and is ignored.
“Sammy never,” Dean says, without raising his head, and Benny has to lean close to hear him. “Sometimes Alastair-sometime he-but that was a trick, that wasn’t really Sammy, it wasn’t.” Dean lets out something that might be a sniffle, and Benny makes an abortive little gesture to pat Dean’s shoulder. Dean tenses and Benny leaves his hand there, a gentle, reassuring pressure. He can feel the angel’s eyes digging into him across the orange ember remains of the fire. “He was lying,” Dean whimpers, “’cause it wasn’t Sammy. It wasn’t.”
“He was nothing but a lying demon sack of shit,” Benny agrees sagely, and the angel’s indeterminable gazes twitches to him.
“It wasn’t Sammy,” says Dean again.
“Surely wasn’t,” says Benny, easing his arm up Dean’s and over his shoulders, watching the blood set into the day out beard on Dean’s face.
“Anyway he never told me my name,” says Dean, voice hollow. “That was Cas. I think. It must have been. I knew my name when I woke up. Not before. Must have been Cas.”
Benny keeps his arm around Dean’s shoulder, glances over at Cas, who is staring at Dean with such intensity that Benny can’t help wondering, once again, exactly who they are to one another.
“Your name is Dean,” Benny says softly, after a moment, and Dean doesn’t look up, but bobs his head once. “And the way I see it,” he continues somewhat recklessly, “is a man does what he’s got to do when he’s in the belly of the whale, and Dean, brother, you were in belly of the goddamn whale.” There isn’t much he’s certain of, but Dean, and Dean’s-not goodness, maybe, but his steadfastness, his heart-that, he has a kind of faith in.
He, the monster, had faith in Dean, who had faith in an angel dressed like a mental patient. Stranger things must have happened.
Dean lets out a dry sob and curls further into himself, and Benny holds fast, pulls Dean against him like a child, and the angel is staring at the two of them with his head cocked like a curious dog, and Dean’s breathing is ragged as he chokes out something about didn’t want and just my brother and he promised, and Benny is so focused on trying to hold Dean together he’s taken by surprise when the angel’s arm comes around Dean from the other side, so he’s curled between them, face still hidden, shaking. Benny and the angel share a look over Dean’s head, and Benny can’t be sure what the angel is thinking, but he know he’s saying thank you for saving him and we have to get out of here and we need Dean to do it and help.
Hesitantly, skittishly, the angel pulls Dean towards him just a bit, settles his chin on the crown of Dean’s head, presses his mouth to Dean’s uninjured temple for half a second. Benny doesn’t let go of Dean, of his brother-in-arms, tries helplessly to shush his babbling, unable to promise him safety or rest or anything but this moment, curled together by the dying fire, three rootless men, far from home. Them against the world.
It isn’t much, but it’s what he has, so he offers it, offers it because maybe to hear it will do Dean some good, and his throat gets stuck when Dean whispers for Sammy, but then he swallows and calls in a thin voice, “Benny?”
“Right here, brother,” says Benny, as Castiel presses his flat lips to Dean’s temple again. “Right here.”
Rating: PG-13
Words: 2,103
Spoilers: Up to the Purgatory flashbacks.
Warnings: Language, nasty hell flashbacks, brief descriptions of torture/mutilation.
Summary: Sometimes Dean isn't quite Dean in Purgatory. Or: how Benny found out about Sam (and Alastair). For caput_mortuum's prompt over at lacerta's Nice Things for Dean meme (my definition of "nice things" might be...a little twisted?).
Neurotic author's notes: Fits in with " The Heart's Bleed Longest," but stands alone just fine. I kind of love writing in Benny's voice? Anyways, title is William Blake's and the cut text is from Leonard Cohen's "Sisters of Mercy."
It’s been a very long time since anything has taken Benny by surprise. There’s not much left he hasn’t seen or heard of, but every once and a while, when they were looking for the angel, Dean would do it-would illicit from Benny naked, genuine shock. And not in his competence-the boy had old school American hunter written all over him, and he came from good stock-nor his devotion to the angel (that was, in Benny’s estimation, another matter entirely).
No, sometimes, when Dean’s blood’s up and there’s something he’s trying to kill, trying to pull information from, something will happen, and Benny will remember being very small, seven, maybe eight, and remorselessly shooting down a squirrel with his older brother’s gun, and his father had raised his eyebrows and coed, “Goddamn, Benny-boy, the devil come into you?” and his mother had laughed from her perch on the porch and said some boys were born with the devil in them.
Funny, that.
At any rate, Benny didn’t want to think too hard about the devil and Dean Winchester, and he wasn’t in the habit of prying, but sometimes-sometimes Dean’s jaw was set and his eyes were glazed, and then he’d be tugging intestines out like a magician’s never-ending rope, slitting skin in torturous intervals, gently extracting hearts, still thumping weakly, from a mess of broken ribs and skewered organs. Benny is a man who knows monsters, and he does not scare easy, but when Dean digs three fingers into a bone deep wound on a thigh, drags his bloody fingers over his lips-there’s a line. He doesn’t care how badly he wants to leave, and he doesn’t care how badly Dean wants to find his angel. There’s a fucking line.
More unsettling still, Dean rarely has clear memories of these interrogations, and will come back to himself in stages, blink wonderingly at the gore that coats his fingers, shake his head and grimace, occasionally vomit. He deflects questions. Benny doesn’t pry. His job is survival, after all, and Dean is a damn good man to have on his side.
Survival, he thinks, as Dean dry-heaves into the mud, frantically wiping his bloody hands on his pants, survival. Not head-shrinking.
But that night, after a shaky, exhausted Dean passes out against a tree, wrung out and unable to even protest when Benny offers to take first watch, he finds himself wondering. Studying that face, pinched and troubled even in sleep, with only a day or two’s stubble roughing up his jaw (Dean insistently shaved with a knife and water-he couldn’t explain why he did it, only that he needed to, and Benny allowed him his indulgences-he was, after all, a human in the no man’s land, and if a quick, dirty attempt at shaving made him feel better, that was his business). Dean was a young man, self-contained and self-possessed, savagely intelligent, quick on his feet. Very clearly a product of the kind of rough-and-ready down-home hunters who’d emerged around the time Benny died-he can remember someone drunkenly lamenting the end of the days of the gentleman hunter.
But Dean is an enigma, for the most part, brothers in arms though they may be. He calls in his sleep, but in the waking hours his focus is singular: survive, find the angel, get gone. He’s saved Benny more than once, and can be, in moments of panic, pain, or fear, astonishingly, shockingly gentle.
Benny has been drifting, lost in thought, and he jerks in surprise when Dean lets out a low moan, and then a kind of keening noise that might be a whimper. Benny tenses, waits to see if this will pass or if he’ll have to wake Dean before he starts attracting undue attention, when Dean lets out a shaky, piteous cry of “Sam?”
Something inside Benny snaps, and maybe it’s just spite or fear or exhaustion, but he reaches over and jostles Dean’s shoulder until he wakes, mumbling, “Stop it, Sammy,” before coming to full awareness.
Dean blinks at him, sits up, hugs his knees. He glances around, apparently surmises why Benny woke him and accepts it.
“Who’s Sam, anyways?” asks Benny, like he’s continuing a previous conversation, even though they’ve never once talked about the things Dean shouts in his sleep.
Dean doesn’t answer, just tucks his chin over his knees and squints at the flickering embers of their fire. He looks like a child, he looks young and lost and shy, and Benny knows better than to keep going, and yet-
“He the one who taught you to pull a heart out like that?”
It’s like Dean’s been shocked-he flinches, his whole body, uncurls, stares at Benny in naked horror, appalled. “No,” he snarls, with a dangerous edge to his voice, and Benny lets it go.
:::
Later, after they’ve found the angel, after Dean has lost himself and threatened to skin Benny alive, after he’s sobbed and shouted into the angel’s lapels and the angel has, in turn, revealed to Benny just how much of the devil was in Dean Winchester-and to think Benny’s been slaughtering his way through Purgatory with the righteous man!-he’s sitting with Dean, propped up against another ancient tree, watching another dying fire. The angel is sitting opposite them, his hooded eyes fixed on the forest behind them.
Dean, who had a few hours earlier taken a spectacular blow to the head, is punchy and still bleeding sluggishly from his temple, the scrap of the angel’s filthy trench coat that had served as a makeshift bandage brown with dirty, drying blood. “Cas,” he says, shakily, and when the angel doesn’t reply he says “Cas” again with enough urgency to merit the angel’s full attention.
“What-what d’you think Sammy’s doing, right now?” he asks, picking at his shredded, mud-crusted pant hem.
“I don’t know, Dean,” says the angel, sounding sincerely sorry, and Dean nods, swallows convulsively, fixes his eyes on the ground.
Then, after a moment, he looks to Benny and says, “Sam’s my brother.” Benny nods, long having accepted that information about Dean-the-unlikely-righteous-man will come in incomplete pieces. “And,” says Dean pointedly, “he’s not that one who taught me how t’kill anybody. I was the one taught him.”
“Yeah?” says Benny, grinning, darkly amused by the idea of Dean in his Sunday best, austerely talking a small boy through the finer points of severing a man’s throat. “You teach him how to pull the hearts, then?”
Dean looks almost as disgusted as he did the first time, and then his face crumples and for a queasy moment, Benny is sure he’s going to cry. He doesn’t, though, merely looks back at the ground and mutters, “That wasn’t Sam. Sam never-even when he-that was Alastair.”
Benny watches Dean, acutely aware that the angel is doing the same, as Dean digs a little hole in the ground with his finger, fills it back in with the displaced dirt. “He was, was this demon.” Dean swallows again, maybe gulps, and Benny wants to tell him to stop, but then Dean’s talking fast and breathing fast and confessing to the ground like dying man. “And he, he taught me how to-to-all kinds of horrible shit, you know, and I did it, I didn’t want to, or I don’t think I did, he said I did, said I was a natural”-he gives a little shudder-“and I got good, man, Jesus, I got good. And when I-when I did something he’d-he’d-to me, when I, like with the ears, or the intestines-he always…” Dean stops for a moment, digs his fingers further into the ground. Benny looks at the angel, whose eyes are fixed firmly on Dean’s face, his brow furrowed. Dean swallows audibly. “He always laughed,” he croaked, “you know, because I-I was doin’ stuff he taught me. Such a good-good pupil, he’d say, daddy’s good-” He stops, hides his face. Blood inches down the side of his face. Benny moves a little closer, wants to place a bracing arm on Dean’s shoulder, doesn’t know how it will be received. He hasn’t had the time-or, if he’s honest, inclination-to think about the full implications of Dean’s being the righteous man in Hell. He and the angel share an unreadable look.
“But when I came up with something new,” says Dean, softly, into his knees, drawing both Benny and the angel’s attention back to him immediately, “then he’d be-he’d be-he promised me he’d tell me my name one day, every day, if I did good. The thing with the-esophagus”-Benny shudders, remembering-“that was me, yeah, I remember he was real-he though I--did real good, he said, I did real good, and I said, ‘Good enough?’ and he said ‘Not yet’ and then he-” Dean stops, buries his face, lets out a shuddery breath.
“Dean,” says the angel lowly, and is ignored.
“Sammy never,” Dean says, without raising his head, and Benny has to lean close to hear him. “Sometimes Alastair-sometime he-but that was a trick, that wasn’t really Sammy, it wasn’t.” Dean lets out something that might be a sniffle, and Benny makes an abortive little gesture to pat Dean’s shoulder. Dean tenses and Benny leaves his hand there, a gentle, reassuring pressure. He can feel the angel’s eyes digging into him across the orange ember remains of the fire. “He was lying,” Dean whimpers, “’cause it wasn’t Sammy. It wasn’t.”
“He was nothing but a lying demon sack of shit,” Benny agrees sagely, and the angel’s indeterminable gazes twitches to him.
“It wasn’t Sammy,” says Dean again.
“Surely wasn’t,” says Benny, easing his arm up Dean’s and over his shoulders, watching the blood set into the day out beard on Dean’s face.
“Anyway he never told me my name,” says Dean, voice hollow. “That was Cas. I think. It must have been. I knew my name when I woke up. Not before. Must have been Cas.”
Benny keeps his arm around Dean’s shoulder, glances over at Cas, who is staring at Dean with such intensity that Benny can’t help wondering, once again, exactly who they are to one another.
“Your name is Dean,” Benny says softly, after a moment, and Dean doesn’t look up, but bobs his head once. “And the way I see it,” he continues somewhat recklessly, “is a man does what he’s got to do when he’s in the belly of the whale, and Dean, brother, you were in belly of the goddamn whale.” There isn’t much he’s certain of, but Dean, and Dean’s-not goodness, maybe, but his steadfastness, his heart-that, he has a kind of faith in.
He, the monster, had faith in Dean, who had faith in an angel dressed like a mental patient. Stranger things must have happened.
Dean lets out a dry sob and curls further into himself, and Benny holds fast, pulls Dean against him like a child, and the angel is staring at the two of them with his head cocked like a curious dog, and Dean’s breathing is ragged as he chokes out something about didn’t want and just my brother and he promised, and Benny is so focused on trying to hold Dean together he’s taken by surprise when the angel’s arm comes around Dean from the other side, so he’s curled between them, face still hidden, shaking. Benny and the angel share a look over Dean’s head, and Benny can’t be sure what the angel is thinking, but he know he’s saying thank you for saving him and we have to get out of here and we need Dean to do it and help.
Hesitantly, skittishly, the angel pulls Dean towards him just a bit, settles his chin on the crown of Dean’s head, presses his mouth to Dean’s uninjured temple for half a second. Benny doesn’t let go of Dean, of his brother-in-arms, tries helplessly to shush his babbling, unable to promise him safety or rest or anything but this moment, curled together by the dying fire, three rootless men, far from home. Them against the world.
It isn’t much, but it’s what he has, so he offers it, offers it because maybe to hear it will do Dean some good, and his throat gets stuck when Dean whispers for Sammy, but then he swallows and calls in a thin voice, “Benny?”
“Right here, brother,” says Benny, as Castiel presses his flat lips to Dean’s temple again. “Right here.”