SPN Big Bang: In the Darkness (With You) - Part IV
See masterpost for summary and further information.
Hell is not Hell. There is no generalized description for it by anyone who’s ever been there, and the place Dean finds himself in after what feels like a long fall is not the Hell he knows. The light is dimmer, darker, everything the color of blood and shit. Black sticks are poking out of the sodden ground like charred bones. It stinks of sulphur, ammoniac and decay.
It’s not worse than the area Dean once called home. It’s not better, either. Comparisons like that are the first step to madness. There are as many different landscapes in Hell as there are on Earth, but all of them are Hell. Meant for eternal punishment. All of them are horrible.
Yet Dean would be a fool not to accept that it gets worse than what he sees or what he lived through. It’s just that thoughts like “It could be worse” are entirely inappropriate. And thinking that others have it better is a foolproof way for the soul to commit suicide.
He looks around and doesn’t see Tessa anywhere. Either she couldn’t enter or she just dropped him here and fucked off. It doesn’t really matter and Dean doesn’t really care. He looks around and sees no movement, no other person, be it demon or hellhound or tortured soul.
Certainly no Sam. But that would have been asking for too much anyway.
Dean doesn’t even know on what circle he is, though he would suspect the third or fifth. It’s probably no deeper than that, and he can rule out the fourth. That’s were he used to be, what he knows. He never saw all of it, but this isn’t it. The smell isn’t right.
And there is no criss-crossing of chains and wriggling bodies in the sky above him.
The ground is soft, wet; thick liquid that looks like puss from an infected wound squirts out as he walks. The black sticks protrude from it in regular intervals, like markings on a field. When Dean looks closer at one of them, he can see remnants of burned flesh clinging to it. So it is charred bone. He’s not surprised in the least.
Something inside him that is familiar with Hell stirs at the sight and informs him it’s an arm. Dean grabs the thing, pulls on it, and the soil lets it go with a sickening wet sound. Sure enough there’s more flesh sticking to it, in the process of rotting off the bone. The thing ends in a hand with exposed sinews and muscles and three remaining fingers. As Dean watches, the fingers twitch.
It’s not Sam’s hand. He places it back onto the ground and keeps walking.
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Somewhere in all of this, Sam is being tortured right now. If he’s really being held on a deeper level where time runs even faster, he is being tortured for hours or days or even weeks with every step Dean takes.
The despair leads to anger, anger to pain. The anger needs an outlet - Dean needs to hurt someone and since the ones deserving of his hatred aren’t here, anyone will do. He hears the screaming of the damned in the distance and gravitates towards them in a mindless desire to lessen his own agony by inflicting agony on someone else.
It’s how he existed for ten years, and it’s so easy to fall back into that. But the torture of strangers won’t help Sam. And Dean might lose himself, might not be the one he was when he finally finds Sam, or he might forget why he was looking in the first place, what the cause of the pain was for which he’s seeking relief. In any case, giving in to the desire will be the first and only necessary step to becoming a demon and Dean won’t do that. Can’t do that. Sam needs him. During his first stay in Hell, he gave in because there had been nothing to hold on for and no hope. Now there’s Sam.
Dean focuses on his determination and ignores the screaming as he walks on.
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As the screams get louder, the ground changes. It dries out, then becomes burning hot. After a day, the soles of Dean’s shoes melt. After another day, his shoes are destroyed and he walks on bare feet that get burned with every step. He never stops. He doesn’t join the chorus of the tortured.
A woman screams nearby: the long, hopeless scream of a soul giving up. Dean shudders, and is glad for the sadness he feels. He’s still himself.
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After a week, a demon finds him. It happens by accident. Dean sees the mangled, repulsive form of a creature unable to remember their own face the moment the demons sees him: an unbroken soul, wandering free. It’s a weak demon, almost mindless. It doesn’t recognize Dean like most other demons would have. He can’t kill it, so he impales it on the branch of a spiked tree and leaves it behind. It can’t help him.
The next demon Dean happens upon can. It’s a woman, or used to be. She’s ugly as the night, but has enough of a face left to leer at him when he presses her against the smouldering ground. She brings up her hips, grinds them against him and hisses, “Winchester. It’s nice to see you again down here. I always knew it would be only a matter of time before you would have a family reunion in our living room.”
She knows Sam is here. Word gets around quickly, even here, and Hell waited far too long to get both of them in its clutches. Dean presses her down until she screams, sits on her to give his own feet a rest and finally she understands that the only way to make him go away is to give him a direction.
Sam is downstairs. Dean knew that, but he didn’t know where to cross to the next circle before she tells him. When he leaves, he’s running despite the burned skin sticking to the ground with every step, the pain that he can ignore because he knows it has no consequence and because finding Sam is more important. He comes to a canyon eventually, and just before he leaps down into the endless blackness it contains, he hears a hellhound howl in the distance and knows they got his trail.
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The fall feels like being torn apart, and then he is upon impact and loses time being set back together from a pile of bloody flesh and broken bones that only knows agony and a name to a human being. He lost every pursuer when he jumped but knows it’s only a matter of time before someone finds him.
He has to be quicker than that. As it happens, he finds someone first, a demon who’s distracted by impaling what’s left of some guy who may or may not deserve it on a stake. Dean uses the element of surprise, does some impaling himself, and learns that he is in the sixth circle and that Sammy isn’t here, because if he was, the demon he caught would be “standing in line, waiting for my turn”. Dean cuts off his head and throws it in the lake of acid in which some parts of the demon’s victim are slowly dissolving, hoping that will shut him up for a while.
He keeps the knife, knowing he’s going to need it, and runs, his lungs burning. He runs until he comes to a city, the buildings grey and all the windows empty. It looks abandoned but Dean knows better than to believe it to be. He has heard of these places and would rather avoid it, if he could.
But there are only two directions to take, and somewhere behind him, he hears the faint echo of a hound’s howl. His heart jumps and speeds up, the fear of the things that tore him apart deeply etched into his soul.
He keeps to the periphery of the city, does his best not to let his fear make him careless and loses it anyway when the hellhound howls again and sounds so much closer.
The city stretches on for hours and days (months for Sam), wedged between an endlessly high wall of stone and an endlessly deep cliff. Dean considers jumping down in hopes of winding up in the seventh circle but is stopped by his fear that he will come down the wall opposite the cliff and lie shattered in this very same city, helpless and for anyone to find.
(The first few yards his burned and bleeding feet left bloody traces on the stone but his wounds heal quickly, and when he turns around, the footprints are already gone.)
It’s silent. There is not a single sound to be heard. All that happens here happens invisibly behind closed doors that leave everything to the imagination. Most of the houses are empty. Not all of them. Dean can’t see anything in the windows but he feels like the windows are seeing him as he creeps through backstreets made of cobblestone. It’s clean and orderly here, sterile. He is an intruder the city does not want and will not tolerate.
He doesn’t rest or stop even once in all the time it takes him to make it to the other side.
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Two days later, a demon looking so human that he can only recently have returned from a trip to the outside pins Dean to a dead tree with a two-headed spear. “Don’t cry, little hunter,” he mocks after spitting in Dean’s face. “You wouldn’t have found little Sammy anyway, and even if you had, he wouldn’t have been what you were looking for. He’s all the way down, don’t you know? As close to the cage as you can get without actually being in it. And if they promised to give him a break if he hurt you, he would tear you to pieces. So really, I’m just sparing you the disappointment. Show me how grateful you are!”
He touches Dean and Dean cuts off his arm with the knife he kept hidden in the waistband of his pants. While the demon screeches, he pulls the spear out of his own chest and uses it to pin the demon to the ground with the spearheads running through his eyes. Afterwards, he stumbles on until his legs give out and he has to wait until his wounds have healed so he’s no longer choking on his own blood.
He finds the way down later that day: a tunnel in the wall leading down and down and down. At parts there are stairs. At other parts the ground is so steep Dean looses his footing and slides down helplessly. This way is not meant to be travelled in the other direction, but Dean will worry about getting back up when the time comes.
He lands with a feeling deep in the pit of his stomach that makes him nervous, makes him want to claw into his own skin and he can’t name it. He’s closer to Sam now, he will find him, and he doesn’t know where this sense of hopelessness comes from, like the echo of a memory not his own.
The air in this place makes it nearly impossible to breathe. As someone long dead, Dean doesn’t have to breathe, but his soul doesn’t know that and his instincts don’t care that they are using only the memory of lungs. The acid stink makes him cough, makes his throat close and his heart race as he’s suffocating, and he knows he will never get used to it.
Overcoming the stink and breathing leads to constant coughing and blood running from his mouth as the air eats away his throat. Dean keeps walking on. (Sam’s in a place worse than this and has been for a long time.)
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He gets lost in the eighth circle for a month, wandering without stopping on feet that are bleeding even when the ground isn’t tearing them apart. The blood leaves an easy trail for the hellhounds to follow. Dean hopes they are still looking for him a level above. He hasn’t heard them in a long time.
Exhaustion wears him down but he keeps walking, his brother the only motivation he needs. The need for rest exists in this place but rest doesn’t, so there is no point in stopping anyway, no matter how much it hurts.
He never meets anyone in all the time. One could think the eighth circle is entirely empty, but Dean knows it’s just big.
Sometimes he imagines other souls, ones without a goal or a meaning, left on this endless plain all alone. Maybe crucified or impaled and then left with their agony and the knowledge that every star in the universe will die without anyone ever coming for them. Maybe just wandering. Wandering until the emptiness drives them mad, until even the torture they know it will bring doesn’t stop them from longing for company. And then, eventually, after years and years and years, they find the end of the wasteland and run into a demon and are so, so glad, and then the demon will torture them and they will regret ever having come here, will wish they stayed on their own with the acid air and the silence forever. And then, in the end, the demon will impale them on a stake and leave them in the wasteland they came from.
But maybe something like that never happens. Dean doesn’t need years to leave the wasteland. He doesn’t like what his imagination does in this place.
He imagines what happens to strangers to avoid imagining what is happening to Sam.
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There is no point of orientation for Dean, not one. No demon to ask how to get deeper down. But he never stops to think about where to go. He just keeps walking as if drawn by an unseen force, as if he knew how to get there. Get to Sam.
Get to Sam.
His name is Dean. He’s the son of John and Mary Winchester. He’s facing eternity without his brother if he gives up, gives in, forgets. (Sam never allowed for the easy way out. Being all alone on the plain was nothing compared to being without Sam.)
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After a while, the ground changes again. Becomes black metal and concrete, and Dean realises when he sees the gaps and straight edges that he’s walking on top of incredibly high, incredibly large buildings. This isn’t like the City. This is somehow worse.
Over stairs and ladders and alleys he makes his way down, letting his instincts guide him. His instincts know the direction, but this is a maze and he gets lost again and again. A sense of time that measures the days in pain with the old, internal clock of Hell, tells him of the passing of many days before finally he finds a circular hole, way down where it’s so dark he can barely see anything, can barely see the first steps leading down, and he knows this is it. The way to the ninth circle, that no soul or demon in their right mind would ever walk in this direction.
There’s a breeze of cooler, fresher air coming up, like an invitation. Dean climbs down, and soon the darkness swallows him whole.
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He wanders through the dark for days, always downwards on winded stairs. He’s not careful because he knows he’s all alone on this stairway to the (second) deepest pit there is. Eventually, there’s light again; not bright but there, and the moment the wall to his left disappears, Dean falls to his knees and down the stairs that keep going on and on, overcome by a despair he can’t fight or justify.
When he comes to a stop, he lies panting, looking up to the underside of something massive and forever, and inside him something feels like screaming. Something he can’t grasp or identify, except he knows it - of course he knows. He’s known all the time, ever since he started to let his instincts guide him. It’s the alien feeling inside him that’s been getting stronger the further down he got and now it’s all there and it’s not alien. It’s just not his.
It’s fear and despair and agony. It’s hopelessness and resignation. It’s humiliation and longing and disgust.
It’s Sam being tortured. Sam, somehow reaching his brother, or maybe it’s Dean somehow reaching him. It doesn’t matter. Sam’s there, somewhere, still far away, and Dean, halfway back to his feet, almost gets knocked downs again when the pain strikes. It doesn’t even hurt him; it hurts Sam, and that is so much worse.
It’s distracting and dangerous, but Dean reaches out to the sense of his brother, needing to hold on to him after such a long time of separation. He doesn’t dare to try and block him off for fear of losing him again. He won’t let him suffer alone.
It’s not even like he can tell what is being done to his brother right now. He can’t read Sam’s thoughts or tell where he is. He just gets an impression of how he is, and he’s not good.
He can tell Sam’s not fighting. Whatever is happening to him, Dean’s brother is accepting it because this is Hell and he has nothing to hope for.
Hold on, Sammy, Dean thinks. Hold on, I’m coming.
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Dean figures the sense of Sam is so much stronger here because of the time shift. When he was on the upper circles, time moved so much slower for him than it did for his brother and everything was compressed and mashed together, since Sam went through so many different forms of suffering in one of Dean’s moments.
Now it’s all happening in real time, and while Dean can’t tell exactly what is happening, he has ideas. After all, the tortures of Hell aren’t a stranger to him. He gets a sense of shame, humiliation and helplessness from Sam, a sense of being used and degraded and knows his brother is getting raped. It goes on for a long time while Dean climbs down the stairs, for hours and hours. Weeks, even. The stairs don’t end. He can’t make out the underside of the eighth circle anymore; it’s long since gotten lost to the grey twilight and there might just as well be a sky above him. The ground comes closer slowly, but a long time and many stairs go by before he can even make it out in the distance. He is just able to recognize distinctive structures far, far below when they start forcing themselves on his brother, and that sensation stays with him for far too long. Nothing changes but for Sam’s desperation growing, for as long as Dean needs to be level with the highest towers that are rising up from the sea of bare, windowless buildings.
It takes days. There have to be dozens of them. And through that sense of desolate hopelessness, Dean reaches back for his brother. Tries to let him know that he’s coming, that he’ll be there soon and then it’ll stop hurting and his big brother will kill them all, every last one of them. But the feeling of abuse is replaced only by all-consuming, mindless agony as they change their torture without a moment of respite and there’s no recognition, no sense of Dean in all that. Sam is suffering and he doesn’t know Dean is going to save him.
The uneven stairs wind around a thick pillar that reaches up into the sky as if supporting it. Every now and then Dean thinks he sees something moving through the twilight, just at the edge of his vision, sliding through the air like a knife through flesh. He knows there are worse things than hellhounds on the lower levels.
But they never come closer, either not seeing him or not caring. Or they are playing a game. Dean can’t care as long as Sam’s suffering all alone. He will care as soon as it’s his job to keep his brother safe on the way back up.
There are bridges connecting the pillar with paths between the buildings. Dean ignores them for a long time. They are all going in the wrong direction. Only when he finds one that points towards the area he’s drawn to does he leave the stairs and disappears in the maze built from faceless buildings. Buildings on top of buildings on top of buildings, and not all of them have doors. After a while of wandering up and down stairs, through tunnels and up rusty ladders, Dean sees a tower in the distance that is higher than any he has seen before, and he knows this is it. Sam’s in there, all the way up, like a fucking princess in a fairy tale. Only, that princess was just sleeping. At this point, Sam might have forgotten what sleep is.
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Dean hurries, but he can only run so fast. He gets lost, has to backtrack his own bloody footsteps and look for another way when he loses sight of the tower. He has to hide, once, from something he can hear breathing in the shadows but he can never see. At some point his body refuses to let him move on and he has to rest until his body understands that rest is not going to do anything to make it regain the strength it lost. Only after his body gave up trying to recover can he walk again.
All the time he listens to Sam inside him and his heart is breaking without pause. Dean isn’t easily shaken, but his brother’s torment scares him like nothing else he’s ever felt.
In all the time, Dean only ever sees one demon. It walks between the buildings and Dean hides until it’s gone. He has never seen a demon like it before. It’s huge and foreign, a mass of claws and thorns and scars, and it leaves a trail of blood and shredded skin in its wake. He can’t tell the gender, or if it even has one. The shape is only vaguely humanoid, the knees bend in the wrong direction, the hands don’t have the right number of fingers. This is what happens when even the last memory of humanity is driven out of a soul.
He avoids a confrontation, unwilling to test the strength of a creature that has existed on cruelty for millennia and has nothing left to be taken away. The thing has nothing to offer him. Dean knows where Sam is, but for the first time he begins to worry about what might be with him.
NEXT
Hell is not Hell. There is no generalized description for it by anyone who’s ever been there, and the place Dean finds himself in after what feels like a long fall is not the Hell he knows. The light is dimmer, darker, everything the color of blood and shit. Black sticks are poking out of the sodden ground like charred bones. It stinks of sulphur, ammoniac and decay.
It’s not worse than the area Dean once called home. It’s not better, either. Comparisons like that are the first step to madness. There are as many different landscapes in Hell as there are on Earth, but all of them are Hell. Meant for eternal punishment. All of them are horrible.
Yet Dean would be a fool not to accept that it gets worse than what he sees or what he lived through. It’s just that thoughts like “It could be worse” are entirely inappropriate. And thinking that others have it better is a foolproof way for the soul to commit suicide.
He looks around and doesn’t see Tessa anywhere. Either she couldn’t enter or she just dropped him here and fucked off. It doesn’t really matter and Dean doesn’t really care. He looks around and sees no movement, no other person, be it demon or hellhound or tortured soul.
Certainly no Sam. But that would have been asking for too much anyway.
Dean doesn’t even know on what circle he is, though he would suspect the third or fifth. It’s probably no deeper than that, and he can rule out the fourth. That’s were he used to be, what he knows. He never saw all of it, but this isn’t it. The smell isn’t right.
And there is no criss-crossing of chains and wriggling bodies in the sky above him.
The ground is soft, wet; thick liquid that looks like puss from an infected wound squirts out as he walks. The black sticks protrude from it in regular intervals, like markings on a field. When Dean looks closer at one of them, he can see remnants of burned flesh clinging to it. So it is charred bone. He’s not surprised in the least.
Something inside him that is familiar with Hell stirs at the sight and informs him it’s an arm. Dean grabs the thing, pulls on it, and the soil lets it go with a sickening wet sound. Sure enough there’s more flesh sticking to it, in the process of rotting off the bone. The thing ends in a hand with exposed sinews and muscles and three remaining fingers. As Dean watches, the fingers twitch.
It’s not Sam’s hand. He places it back onto the ground and keeps walking.
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Somewhere in all of this, Sam is being tortured right now. If he’s really being held on a deeper level where time runs even faster, he is being tortured for hours or days or even weeks with every step Dean takes.
The despair leads to anger, anger to pain. The anger needs an outlet - Dean needs to hurt someone and since the ones deserving of his hatred aren’t here, anyone will do. He hears the screaming of the damned in the distance and gravitates towards them in a mindless desire to lessen his own agony by inflicting agony on someone else.
It’s how he existed for ten years, and it’s so easy to fall back into that. But the torture of strangers won’t help Sam. And Dean might lose himself, might not be the one he was when he finally finds Sam, or he might forget why he was looking in the first place, what the cause of the pain was for which he’s seeking relief. In any case, giving in to the desire will be the first and only necessary step to becoming a demon and Dean won’t do that. Can’t do that. Sam needs him. During his first stay in Hell, he gave in because there had been nothing to hold on for and no hope. Now there’s Sam.
Dean focuses on his determination and ignores the screaming as he walks on.
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As the screams get louder, the ground changes. It dries out, then becomes burning hot. After a day, the soles of Dean’s shoes melt. After another day, his shoes are destroyed and he walks on bare feet that get burned with every step. He never stops. He doesn’t join the chorus of the tortured.
A woman screams nearby: the long, hopeless scream of a soul giving up. Dean shudders, and is glad for the sadness he feels. He’s still himself.
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After a week, a demon finds him. It happens by accident. Dean sees the mangled, repulsive form of a creature unable to remember their own face the moment the demons sees him: an unbroken soul, wandering free. It’s a weak demon, almost mindless. It doesn’t recognize Dean like most other demons would have. He can’t kill it, so he impales it on the branch of a spiked tree and leaves it behind. It can’t help him.
The next demon Dean happens upon can. It’s a woman, or used to be. She’s ugly as the night, but has enough of a face left to leer at him when he presses her against the smouldering ground. She brings up her hips, grinds them against him and hisses, “Winchester. It’s nice to see you again down here. I always knew it would be only a matter of time before you would have a family reunion in our living room.”
She knows Sam is here. Word gets around quickly, even here, and Hell waited far too long to get both of them in its clutches. Dean presses her down until she screams, sits on her to give his own feet a rest and finally she understands that the only way to make him go away is to give him a direction.
Sam is downstairs. Dean knew that, but he didn’t know where to cross to the next circle before she tells him. When he leaves, he’s running despite the burned skin sticking to the ground with every step, the pain that he can ignore because he knows it has no consequence and because finding Sam is more important. He comes to a canyon eventually, and just before he leaps down into the endless blackness it contains, he hears a hellhound howl in the distance and knows they got his trail.
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The fall feels like being torn apart, and then he is upon impact and loses time being set back together from a pile of bloody flesh and broken bones that only knows agony and a name to a human being. He lost every pursuer when he jumped but knows it’s only a matter of time before someone finds him.
He has to be quicker than that. As it happens, he finds someone first, a demon who’s distracted by impaling what’s left of some guy who may or may not deserve it on a stake. Dean uses the element of surprise, does some impaling himself, and learns that he is in the sixth circle and that Sammy isn’t here, because if he was, the demon he caught would be “standing in line, waiting for my turn”. Dean cuts off his head and throws it in the lake of acid in which some parts of the demon’s victim are slowly dissolving, hoping that will shut him up for a while.
He keeps the knife, knowing he’s going to need it, and runs, his lungs burning. He runs until he comes to a city, the buildings grey and all the windows empty. It looks abandoned but Dean knows better than to believe it to be. He has heard of these places and would rather avoid it, if he could.
But there are only two directions to take, and somewhere behind him, he hears the faint echo of a hound’s howl. His heart jumps and speeds up, the fear of the things that tore him apart deeply etched into his soul.
He keeps to the periphery of the city, does his best not to let his fear make him careless and loses it anyway when the hellhound howls again and sounds so much closer.
The city stretches on for hours and days (months for Sam), wedged between an endlessly high wall of stone and an endlessly deep cliff. Dean considers jumping down in hopes of winding up in the seventh circle but is stopped by his fear that he will come down the wall opposite the cliff and lie shattered in this very same city, helpless and for anyone to find.
(The first few yards his burned and bleeding feet left bloody traces on the stone but his wounds heal quickly, and when he turns around, the footprints are already gone.)
It’s silent. There is not a single sound to be heard. All that happens here happens invisibly behind closed doors that leave everything to the imagination. Most of the houses are empty. Not all of them. Dean can’t see anything in the windows but he feels like the windows are seeing him as he creeps through backstreets made of cobblestone. It’s clean and orderly here, sterile. He is an intruder the city does not want and will not tolerate.
He doesn’t rest or stop even once in all the time it takes him to make it to the other side.
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Two days later, a demon looking so human that he can only recently have returned from a trip to the outside pins Dean to a dead tree with a two-headed spear. “Don’t cry, little hunter,” he mocks after spitting in Dean’s face. “You wouldn’t have found little Sammy anyway, and even if you had, he wouldn’t have been what you were looking for. He’s all the way down, don’t you know? As close to the cage as you can get without actually being in it. And if they promised to give him a break if he hurt you, he would tear you to pieces. So really, I’m just sparing you the disappointment. Show me how grateful you are!”
He touches Dean and Dean cuts off his arm with the knife he kept hidden in the waistband of his pants. While the demon screeches, he pulls the spear out of his own chest and uses it to pin the demon to the ground with the spearheads running through his eyes. Afterwards, he stumbles on until his legs give out and he has to wait until his wounds have healed so he’s no longer choking on his own blood.
He finds the way down later that day: a tunnel in the wall leading down and down and down. At parts there are stairs. At other parts the ground is so steep Dean looses his footing and slides down helplessly. This way is not meant to be travelled in the other direction, but Dean will worry about getting back up when the time comes.
He lands with a feeling deep in the pit of his stomach that makes him nervous, makes him want to claw into his own skin and he can’t name it. He’s closer to Sam now, he will find him, and he doesn’t know where this sense of hopelessness comes from, like the echo of a memory not his own.
The air in this place makes it nearly impossible to breathe. As someone long dead, Dean doesn’t have to breathe, but his soul doesn’t know that and his instincts don’t care that they are using only the memory of lungs. The acid stink makes him cough, makes his throat close and his heart race as he’s suffocating, and he knows he will never get used to it.
Overcoming the stink and breathing leads to constant coughing and blood running from his mouth as the air eats away his throat. Dean keeps walking on. (Sam’s in a place worse than this and has been for a long time.)
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He gets lost in the eighth circle for a month, wandering without stopping on feet that are bleeding even when the ground isn’t tearing them apart. The blood leaves an easy trail for the hellhounds to follow. Dean hopes they are still looking for him a level above. He hasn’t heard them in a long time.
Exhaustion wears him down but he keeps walking, his brother the only motivation he needs. The need for rest exists in this place but rest doesn’t, so there is no point in stopping anyway, no matter how much it hurts.
He never meets anyone in all the time. One could think the eighth circle is entirely empty, but Dean knows it’s just big.
Sometimes he imagines other souls, ones without a goal or a meaning, left on this endless plain all alone. Maybe crucified or impaled and then left with their agony and the knowledge that every star in the universe will die without anyone ever coming for them. Maybe just wandering. Wandering until the emptiness drives them mad, until even the torture they know it will bring doesn’t stop them from longing for company. And then, eventually, after years and years and years, they find the end of the wasteland and run into a demon and are so, so glad, and then the demon will torture them and they will regret ever having come here, will wish they stayed on their own with the acid air and the silence forever. And then, in the end, the demon will impale them on a stake and leave them in the wasteland they came from.
But maybe something like that never happens. Dean doesn’t need years to leave the wasteland. He doesn’t like what his imagination does in this place.
He imagines what happens to strangers to avoid imagining what is happening to Sam.
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There is no point of orientation for Dean, not one. No demon to ask how to get deeper down. But he never stops to think about where to go. He just keeps walking as if drawn by an unseen force, as if he knew how to get there. Get to Sam.
Get to Sam.
His name is Dean. He’s the son of John and Mary Winchester. He’s facing eternity without his brother if he gives up, gives in, forgets. (Sam never allowed for the easy way out. Being all alone on the plain was nothing compared to being without Sam.)
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After a while, the ground changes again. Becomes black metal and concrete, and Dean realises when he sees the gaps and straight edges that he’s walking on top of incredibly high, incredibly large buildings. This isn’t like the City. This is somehow worse.
Over stairs and ladders and alleys he makes his way down, letting his instincts guide him. His instincts know the direction, but this is a maze and he gets lost again and again. A sense of time that measures the days in pain with the old, internal clock of Hell, tells him of the passing of many days before finally he finds a circular hole, way down where it’s so dark he can barely see anything, can barely see the first steps leading down, and he knows this is it. The way to the ninth circle, that no soul or demon in their right mind would ever walk in this direction.
There’s a breeze of cooler, fresher air coming up, like an invitation. Dean climbs down, and soon the darkness swallows him whole.
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He wanders through the dark for days, always downwards on winded stairs. He’s not careful because he knows he’s all alone on this stairway to the (second) deepest pit there is. Eventually, there’s light again; not bright but there, and the moment the wall to his left disappears, Dean falls to his knees and down the stairs that keep going on and on, overcome by a despair he can’t fight or justify.
When he comes to a stop, he lies panting, looking up to the underside of something massive and forever, and inside him something feels like screaming. Something he can’t grasp or identify, except he knows it - of course he knows. He’s known all the time, ever since he started to let his instincts guide him. It’s the alien feeling inside him that’s been getting stronger the further down he got and now it’s all there and it’s not alien. It’s just not his.
It’s fear and despair and agony. It’s hopelessness and resignation. It’s humiliation and longing and disgust.
It’s Sam being tortured. Sam, somehow reaching his brother, or maybe it’s Dean somehow reaching him. It doesn’t matter. Sam’s there, somewhere, still far away, and Dean, halfway back to his feet, almost gets knocked downs again when the pain strikes. It doesn’t even hurt him; it hurts Sam, and that is so much worse.
It’s distracting and dangerous, but Dean reaches out to the sense of his brother, needing to hold on to him after such a long time of separation. He doesn’t dare to try and block him off for fear of losing him again. He won’t let him suffer alone.
It’s not even like he can tell what is being done to his brother right now. He can’t read Sam’s thoughts or tell where he is. He just gets an impression of how he is, and he’s not good.
He can tell Sam’s not fighting. Whatever is happening to him, Dean’s brother is accepting it because this is Hell and he has nothing to hope for.
Hold on, Sammy, Dean thinks. Hold on, I’m coming.
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Dean figures the sense of Sam is so much stronger here because of the time shift. When he was on the upper circles, time moved so much slower for him than it did for his brother and everything was compressed and mashed together, since Sam went through so many different forms of suffering in one of Dean’s moments.
Now it’s all happening in real time, and while Dean can’t tell exactly what is happening, he has ideas. After all, the tortures of Hell aren’t a stranger to him. He gets a sense of shame, humiliation and helplessness from Sam, a sense of being used and degraded and knows his brother is getting raped. It goes on for a long time while Dean climbs down the stairs, for hours and hours. Weeks, even. The stairs don’t end. He can’t make out the underside of the eighth circle anymore; it’s long since gotten lost to the grey twilight and there might just as well be a sky above him. The ground comes closer slowly, but a long time and many stairs go by before he can even make it out in the distance. He is just able to recognize distinctive structures far, far below when they start forcing themselves on his brother, and that sensation stays with him for far too long. Nothing changes but for Sam’s desperation growing, for as long as Dean needs to be level with the highest towers that are rising up from the sea of bare, windowless buildings.
It takes days. There have to be dozens of them. And through that sense of desolate hopelessness, Dean reaches back for his brother. Tries to let him know that he’s coming, that he’ll be there soon and then it’ll stop hurting and his big brother will kill them all, every last one of them. But the feeling of abuse is replaced only by all-consuming, mindless agony as they change their torture without a moment of respite and there’s no recognition, no sense of Dean in all that. Sam is suffering and he doesn’t know Dean is going to save him.
The uneven stairs wind around a thick pillar that reaches up into the sky as if supporting it. Every now and then Dean thinks he sees something moving through the twilight, just at the edge of his vision, sliding through the air like a knife through flesh. He knows there are worse things than hellhounds on the lower levels.
But they never come closer, either not seeing him or not caring. Or they are playing a game. Dean can’t care as long as Sam’s suffering all alone. He will care as soon as it’s his job to keep his brother safe on the way back up.
There are bridges connecting the pillar with paths between the buildings. Dean ignores them for a long time. They are all going in the wrong direction. Only when he finds one that points towards the area he’s drawn to does he leave the stairs and disappears in the maze built from faceless buildings. Buildings on top of buildings on top of buildings, and not all of them have doors. After a while of wandering up and down stairs, through tunnels and up rusty ladders, Dean sees a tower in the distance that is higher than any he has seen before, and he knows this is it. Sam’s in there, all the way up, like a fucking princess in a fairy tale. Only, that princess was just sleeping. At this point, Sam might have forgotten what sleep is.
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Dean hurries, but he can only run so fast. He gets lost, has to backtrack his own bloody footsteps and look for another way when he loses sight of the tower. He has to hide, once, from something he can hear breathing in the shadows but he can never see. At some point his body refuses to let him move on and he has to rest until his body understands that rest is not going to do anything to make it regain the strength it lost. Only after his body gave up trying to recover can he walk again.
All the time he listens to Sam inside him and his heart is breaking without pause. Dean isn’t easily shaken, but his brother’s torment scares him like nothing else he’s ever felt.
In all the time, Dean only ever sees one demon. It walks between the buildings and Dean hides until it’s gone. He has never seen a demon like it before. It’s huge and foreign, a mass of claws and thorns and scars, and it leaves a trail of blood and shredded skin in its wake. He can’t tell the gender, or if it even has one. The shape is only vaguely humanoid, the knees bend in the wrong direction, the hands don’t have the right number of fingers. This is what happens when even the last memory of humanity is driven out of a soul.
He avoids a confrontation, unwilling to test the strength of a creature that has existed on cruelty for millennia and has nothing left to be taken away. The thing has nothing to offer him. Dean knows where Sam is, but for the first time he begins to worry about what might be with him.
NEXT