I'm trying to get my mojo back here...please review, then off to my blog where I'll answer.

When brute force and evil will are backed with subtlety, resistance none avails.

Dante, Canto XXXI

It's coming. I can feel it in my guts, that constant clenching roll that pushes my heart into my throat. My stomach churns and my head pounds. It's been there, hiding in me, for so long that I can hardly remember not feeling it. The moment is coming and I don't know if I can do it.

For a few short days I thought I had done it. I thought that my trip below had fixed it, that it was over. I was happy, so glad to be back with Sam, with Bobby. I thought it was finished. But I was so very wrong. I couldn't have known how far things had gone while I was away.

I'm so tired. But now I see that it's not over, and part of me would love to jam a shotgun in my mouth because goddamn if I didn't wish this was done. I'm scared, and I know I left part of myself down below, left behind a big part. The things I saw, the things I did, they killed a part of my soul and pinned it like a butterfly forever in hell. Can I still fight without what I left behind?

"Can you smell it, Dean? Can you smell her meat burning? Listen to it; listen to her fat bubble and her skin crackle. Can you feel her terror, boy?" And I did feel it. I felt my mother's fear. "She spent her last minutes knowing that we were going to take her favorite boy, and we were going to rape his soul. We were going to kill everything that he loved, and we were going to break him."

I saw my father's face, burned black, slashed with a ghastly white grin of rictus. The sounds that he made ripped at me like a physical sensation, an animal, visceral sickness at my father's screams. My mind knew that he was gone, that he had flown from hell when the gates opened. But the horror was still real. "He's the man you never were. We'll tear him; we'll flay him open until he drowns in his own entrails. We'll make him suffer as none before has suffered."

But the worst was yet to come. "When we get your brother, when we get your Sammy, oh, we're going to make him scream. We're going to make him suffer more than you could ever imagine. We'll make him beg…we'll break him…" Over and over they showed me what they would do to Sam when they caught him, and I had no doubt that they would catch him. There was no question. I can't even speak of the things that they did to my baby brother, the one I was supposed to protect. His cries still burn in my brain.

I can never explain what it was like when I finally gave in, when I finally turned. I can remember the fire that burned in the deepest pit of my belly, the fire that burned like sex, like need. I took revenge for every loss, every wound, every wrong done to me. Finally, finally, it was an eye for an eye. And I took blood for blood. I paid back every drop that I had ever lost, and a part of me died.

But then Heaven came for me. They pulled me out, lifted me from the Pit, and I believed that it was over. I thought that it was finally done. Then the truth came out, that it was only just beginning. And then they tell me that it's my fault, and I'm the only one who can fix it. Well, fuck you. Fuck you with your grand celestial plans and your damned fate. I get no say? I have no choice in this matter, I'm just supposed to soldier up and do my duty? That's what I've done my whole life, and look where it led me.

Sometimes I get so mad, so fucking outraged. I've done everything, everything that I've been asked to do, by Dad, by Bobby, even by Cas. From the time I was four years old, I turned my back on any semblance of a normal life. I sacrificed everything, trying to do the right thing. I gave my life and gave my soul to do the last thing that Dad ordered me to do.

But it's still coming to this. After all this time, I may still have to follow Dad's last order. How can They ask me to do this? When will it be enough? How much more do they expect me to give?