A/N: So I've kinda been taken over by Supernatural. A state of affairs I completely blame on tumblr and my sister in equal parts. In six months I've gone from barely aware of it to owning all seven seasons, ten books, four comics, the soundtrack and most of the season guides. …This is my life, these are my choices. Anyway, as part of this SPN storming of my brain, Destiel has taken a huge portion of it. This is the first brain child of that take over. Enjoy!

Betas: SkyTurtle

Music:
Lost in You by Three Days Grace

Warnings: Scenes of torture, proceed with caution.

Disclaimer: I do not own Supernatural, nor the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

…

Lost in You

Raven Ehtar

…

When people talk about Hell, they talk about the suffering. No living man or woman could possibly comprehend the level or quality of pain the denizens of the Pit could unleash on a human soul, but they at least knew that pain would be a major element to anyone unfortunate enough to find themselves there. But there was more to Hell than pain. No human could fully grasp an eternity of suffering – their minds retreated from the concept, from trying to imagine it, so they didn't realize that part of the torture came simply from the duration.

But there was still plenty of torment that could be wrought on flesh alone, without the mental anguish. The human body could be divided into a truly impressive number of layers, each and every one of them fully capable of registering the agonies played on them before succumbing and falling, peeling or sizzling away to the next layer. Skin was cut and burned, of course, but also hooked, pierced, twisted and ripped away. Muscles offered all sorts of possibilities, from the heavy handed use of knife or cudgel to the more delicate and refined methods of shredding down to the finest of fibers. The sensory organs, taste, smell and sinuses, eyes and ears all offered their own specializations that Hell had had all of Creation learning how to exploit. Organs and bones and the bare nervous system… if he were lucky he was only partially conscious when they were worked on.

Dean Winchester was never quite that lucky.

Everything was stripped away, layer by layer, until only his awareness remained to him. The relief of no longer having anything that could be damaged only lasted a moment before he would be whole again. Whole, unmarked, and ready for a fresh round of agony.

He would have forgotten his name, who he was, just lost his grip on it during the countless days of pain and terror, except that they wouldn't let him. The demons that surrounded him on all sides would tell him his name over and over, would taunt him with the tales of what his life had been before the Pit, denying him the respite of forgetfulness. His memories were one thing that could inflict more suffering if they were left intact. With them he could see how far he had fallen. With his still mostly intact he remained aware of what was done to him and could consider all that was to come, and what could have been if he'd just acted a little bit differently in life.

So while his body was destroyed every day just to be brought back to suffer more, his mind was carefully preserved.

Every day, when the pain had reached its end, Alistair, his torturer, would make him the offer of letting him off of the rack, of letting the pain all end. All Dean had to do was trade the rack for the blade, to put other souls in his place and begin the pain. It really was a devil's choice, and every time Dean kept enough of his humanity to say no, to choose more pain instead of relief, to receive rather than deal out agony, and he stayed on the rack, enduring, with the knowledge that even if he wasn't sparing another by his refusals, he was winning against the demons by holding tight to his morals.

For thirty years he held on. For thirty years he kept true and unbending. But at the end of those thirty years – the length of his entire life on Earth – he wondered 'why?' What was the point of holding on to his humanity in such a place as this, when the noble intent only earned him more pain? There would be no respite, only eternal suffering for all of his high intentions.

If he was to spend all of eternity in Hell, them some of that suffering might as well be spread around.

He took Alistair's blade, he got off the rack, and the first soul he turned on… the screams Dean got it to sing out were some of the most beautiful sounds he had ever heard. Because they weren't his.

After so long the victim himself, there was a rush unlike any other to finally be the one doing the inflicting, to be the one in control. At first he would imagine the souls bound to his rack were his own tormentors, finally in his power and feeling his wrath, helpless under the very tools they had used on Dean over the last three decades. At first he only lashed out, hurting who he could in lieu of who he wanted, but at some point, some time when he lost count of the souls he'd entertained on his rack, he began to enjoy the pain he inflicted without needing to imagine anything.

That was when Alistair came back to him, this time as a mentor. A teacher.

"It's not just their pain you have to consider, Dean. Your pleasure is just as important. You'll find that different qualities of suffering correlate to different qualities of pleasure. Coarse methods produce animalistic euphoria, while sophisticated technique will give you an orgasmic high.

"But these are just guidelines, Dean. Experiment. See what gives you a really good tickle…"

A part of Dean recoiled, sickened by the oily instructions being whispered into his ear. But another part, far too large a one, listened, learned and applied.

The slick feel of steel inserted between bones, into organs; the rough crunching of bones turned to powder as the victim screamed, unable to pass out; the sound of flesh tearing apart when Dean used his bare fingers, when the tools put too much distance between himself and his work; the feel of blood and other fluids thick on his hands… these were his only sensations now, and he reveled in them. He craved them. He set himself goals to challenge his skill and imagination, and he hoped to one day have a soul that would last more than a day.

And as he exulted in his dark pleasure, Dean realized that this was how demons were made.

Then a bright light – so bright! It burned with a purity that was foreign to this place. Hell was full of fires, but they all burned dully, sullenly, the very flame a source of filth and disease. This light scored deeply into everything like a knife, a scalpel excising a cancerous growth. It burned away the stinking corruption it touched, and all fled before it, confused and terrified.

It came at Dean, too fast for him to escape, and somehow it latched on to one shoulder. The light and the grip, they both burned. Dean was frightened, confused, but more than either, he was pissed. How dare anything hurt him? Did this light not know he was no longer on the rack, that he wasn't the victim? It was his job to do the hurting, not the other way around!

Maddened beyond reason, Dean lashed out at the formless light, an animal caught in a trap, striking with anything at anything, determined to return the pain being dealt him tenfold, to free himself and then strap the interloping firefly to his rack and see what his imagination could suggest to him.

He might as well have fought sunlight for all the good it did him. His fist struck something solid, but the grip did not loosen. Instead, Dean felt himself being dragged, of being lifted, and he went mad, striking, clawing, pulling, stabbing, cursing and spitting, anything to get free of this unknown thing.

None of it made any difference, and Dean was drawn into the light.

...

"You know, we should have seen it coming. That you would turn demon."

Dean stared, shock and burgeoning anger fighting for dominance in his mind, in his expression. "What the hell are you talking about?"

Sam, his own face one of unambiguous disdain, sneered at his brother, who found it hard to believe that this was Sammy, his little brother Sammy, who was looking down his nose at him like he was the leavings of a sick cat on the carpet. For the life of him he couldn't remember how they had gotten on this subject in the first place, but now that they had the temperature in the room had taken a definite downward turn. Sam tossed his head. "C'mon, Dean," he said, as though talking to a slow child. "It's so obvious. You've been making this show of worrying about me, about making sure I don't go dark side, riding my ass about every little thing, when all this time it was you."

"What-?"

"You," Same repeated, his voice biting at Dean with its accusation. "You were acting like the righteous brother all this time when it's you who's gone dark side. You tore into those poor souls in Hell, Dean. You became a demon, a thing that feeds on human suffering, and then you come back and act like I'm the dangerous one?" He shook his head, the incredulous smile springing over his features nearly as bad as the disdain. "And all this time it was so we wouldn't think to ask if the Dean who came back was the same one we lost. If what we have now is entirely human."

"I am human, dammit!" Dean snapped back, but there was a tiny grain of doubt in his mind, and it must have carried in his voice, because Sam tilted his head at him, one eyebrow raised. "Sammy, I'm human," he repeated, but even to him it sounded weak.

"Are you sure about that, Dean?" Sam asked, taking a step closer to him. It was a threatening step, the kind he'd seen his brother use on countless supernatural nasties, but never on him. Almost never. "Are you sure that in all the time you spent torturing human souls you managed to stay completely human yourself? That you didn't come to like it, just a little bit?" He leaned forward, his voice lowering so that even were there anyone else, Dean was the only one capable of hearing him. "That you don't miss it?"

The elder Winchester jerked back from the accusation, staring at his brother with shocked eyes. Miss it? Miss torturing the souls of the damned with his hands, of hearing their screams? Who would miss anything of the kind?

Only a demon.

"Are you sure that you aren't what we ought to be hunting?" Sam asked, and now there was a dangerous glint in his eye, a readiness in his stance that warned Dean: he was prey now. He was home and free, but he had somehow become the enemy. There was darkness in him that marked him.

"Dean?"

Sam took another step towards him, closing the space with an unmistakable air of menace. Dean couldn't bring himself to retreat. If he did, then it would only prove Sammy right. "We would be doing the world a service putting down another Hell spawn demon."

"Dean."

Dean stared at his brother with blank, empty eyes. Maybe it would be best to be killed now, he thought. Sent back to Hell where he belonged. And far better to be put down by his brother, who might at least remember what it was like to care for him, rather than to leave it to some random hunter who they crossed and who recognized Dean for what he was. Yes, better now rather than later…

"Dean!"

Suddenly there was someone else in the room with them, someone who managed to stand between him and Sam. Someone in a dirty trench coat, who put a hand on his shoulder in a familiar and comfortable grip. With an abrupt dizziness, the room they stood in spun away to nothing.

Sam disappeared, and Dean and Castiel were very abruptly outside, standing on the grass of a wide park, a bench standing nearby. Dean looked around, up at the trees whose branches gently swayed overhead, to the hills all covered with a green fur-like lawn and cut through with a single, winding walking path, and finally to the angel that had rescued him. Or possibly abducted him.

Castiel looked as stoic as he ever did. He stood still, looking over the soft, grassy scene with an air of one making sure all is right, his eyes scanning those places where dangers would lurk, visually securing the area in a fast, familiar fashion.

When he looked back to Dean his face was relatively empty of expression, but Dean was learning how to read him, angel of the Lord and celestial soldier boy or not. You watched his eyes, the skin around them for telltale tightening or twitches, and you watched the set of his head and his shoulders. If you could make a close guess where his mind was and throw off his balance, then the stoic bastard was more likely to show some feeling.

Right now he was examining Dean's face with the same attention and focus that he had just given their surroundings, as though trying to discover the hidden dangers and unseen perils. It was an examining look that Dean had come to expect from the angel. Hidden behind it, though, was something else. The way Cass held himself seemed more reserved than usual, if that were possible, and Dean noticed that he seemed unwilling to hold his eye more than a few seconds, which was unusual for him. It all made the hunter think Cass was uneasy, possibly trying to hide something from him. This was never a good idea.

Dean gave the place one last cursory look, then back to Cass. "Okay," he said in a testing kind of way. "So is this a dream, or did you really just save me from my own brother going hunter happy on me?"

"It's a dream," Cass said, still staring at his face. Not at his eyes, but his face. Dean did his best to ignore it. "You've been having nightmares your entire REM cycle."

"So you just decided to change that, huh?" Now that he was out of the nightmares, the sudden relief was making him feel antsy, like there was still something out there to fight if he could just find it. It made him snappish. "Not for nothin', Cass, but I'm not buying it. You broke into my head while I'm sleeping again, it means you want something. What is it?"

At that Cass did look away from Dean, which caught his attention. He tried to cover the lapse by walking over to the bench and sitting down, the trench coat falling to the sides around his legs. "Nothing," he said eventually, staring over the empty grass. "I don't need anything from you, Dean. I simply saw that you were experiencing some disturbing dreams and decided to intervene. I thought you would have a much more restful night with pleasanter surroundings."

Dean looked at the trees, gently swaying in a cool breeze that rustled the leaves, the sun casting everything in green and gold as it shone through the canopy. The bench was placed beneath one of the largest of these trees, the bark cut through with deep, natural cracks like the wrinkles of an old man's face. The curving path wound by on one side of the bench, offering the passing traveler a place to rest. Apparently Cass's definition of 'pleasant' was synonymous with 'uneventful' or 'boring' if Dean were feeling ungenerous. Not that Dean was complaining, but did it have to be the equivalent of some Zen master's secret hideout for lunch hour?

"Most people would have just woke me up, you know," Dean pointed out. "Not gone all caped crusader on my brain. Or," he gestured vaguely at Cass, "trench-coated crusader."

The angel shrugged, still not looking up at him. "You said that you needed your sleep. I didn't want to wake you if it was unnecessary."

Dean frowned. Something wasn't quite right with what Cass was telling him. He'd been learning quickly that the Heavenly host was not only capable of all of humanity's little sins and foibles, but they indulged in some of them quite freely. Such as lying. He didn't like the idea of Cass lying to him, but that's certainly what seemed to be going on. But what exactly was he lying about, or withholding or whatever, and why? It would be a natural instinct to challenge Cass directly, to demand that he tell him what was going on and why he was acting squirrely, but he'd done it often enough to know what kind of response he would get: A few details, a halfhearted and only partial explanation, followed by that annoying, abrupt exit.

He decided on a lateral play this time, see if that got him any better results. He looked out over the grass the way the angel was, lowering the implicit level of aggression. Less aggression, less reason to hide what you were thinking, right? "How could you tell that I was having nightmares?"

There was a long pause as Cass apparently worked out his answer. The rolling lawns, for all their peacefulness, had absolutely nothing worth keeping his interest, and Dean found it hard to keep his stare fixed out on it and not turn to look at Cass. He had a bad habit of disappearing whenever Dean took his eyes off of him, and while he could tell now that he was still there, it was an uncomfortable feeling to have, the possibility that if he looked, then Cass would be gone. When the deep voice finally came, Dean was foolishly relieved to hear it.

"I could see it in how you slept," he said. "You were tossing, turning, talking in your sleep. I reasoned that—"

"Bullshit, Cass," Dean interrupted, still not turning around. "That doesn't happen, not even with my worst dreams. And even if that were how I was behaving, then Sam would have something to say about it. He would either wake me or check for possession, depending on what I was saying." He flicked a hand, impatiently. "Try again, feather boy."

A briefer pause hung in the air, followed by a slightly embarrassed, "Well, maybe not quite as severe as I made it sound. But there were signs that you were suffering. Signs only an angel would be capable of seeing."

"Such as?"

This time there was no reply at all, and Dean finally turned around. Cass was leaning forward on the bench, his elbows braced on his knees, and looking utterly miserable. For an angel.

Dean didn't feel particularly sympathetic at that moment. "Cass. What 'signs' did you see?"

Cass sighed. He looked disgruntled – which was an expression that was becoming more and more familiar on his face – and slightly embarrassed, which was less familiar and a little intriguing. "I'll admit that was a misleading statement. The signs that I refer to were when I saw your normal dreams, which were neutral and not damaging, turn into a play on your worst memories and an extrapolation on your fears."

Dean thought about this, and then shrugged. "Okay, so that's when you noticed. I kinda figured that part, Cass. I didn't think that you noticed nightmares starting before they did."

"No, you don't quite understand," Cass said, and Dean was surprised to see that he looked even more embarrassed than before. "I was already here, in your dreams, when they turned dark."

The hunter stared blankly at the angel, who appeared to be completely absorbed in the intricacies of grass blades at long distances. Dean would be the first to admit, hell, to insist that he had a bizarre day job, one that lent itself to disturbing encounters and experiences that would give anyone nightmares, but not much of it bothered him anymore. He grew up with monsters, and the time when he had been easy to disturb had passed away a long time ago. But someone looking in on his mind, when he was dreaming and might be revealing who knew what about himself? That was a little out there for him, especially when it was being done by someone who he trusted.

"What the hell, Cass? Why the fascination with my dream time, aren't your own dreams enough for you?"

Castiel shifted, a rare fidget, and looked up at Dean. It wasn't quite the same steady stare the angel normally leveled on him, and Dean felt some of his righteous bluster go out of him. "I don't dream, Dean," he said, and something painful edged around his words. "No angel can. We have no need to. We don't sleep, and we are creatures of obedience, so what could we possibly need or have to dream about? So. That's why," he said, looking away again with finality. "I wanted to see what it was like to dream."

Dean wasn't quite sure how to deal with that particular revelation. For the most part, his mind simply blanked out. "Well you sure have a hell of a talent for picking minds for your little sightseeing tour," he grumbled, having nothing better to say. "My head's not the best choice for a nighttime vacation. Plus it's a little creepy."

"No. Sometimes it can be quite unpleasant, as it was tonight, but in most cases," a ghost of a smile flickered over Cass's face, his eyes slipping away from Dean to gaze somewhere far away. "In most cases they are… instructive, as well as pleasant. I understand why humans set so much store by dreaming, when it's such a preferable alternative to reality." He shook himself a little, coming back from wherever he'd allowed his mind to wander to. "But, since you find it disagreeable to have someone looking in on you, I'll let you dream in solitude."

"Cass, wait!" Dean threw out quickly, taking a step toward the bench. He was surprised that he managed to stop the angel before he did his little disappearing act, and Cass seemed just as surprised when he looked up at him questioningly.

Dean froze, suddenly uncertain. He was still a little creeped out by the idea of there being someone lurking in his brain, spying on his innermost thoughts without his knowing, and the fact that it was being done by someone that he implicitly trusted only made it that much worse. How many of his dreams had Castiel been privy to, had known about and had in his mind as part of the background tapestry of 'what makes Dean tick' when they were talking or fighting together in the waking world? Sneaky damned angel, piggybacking on his dream time.

But at the same time, if this is what he was hiding, then it wasn't nearly so bad as it could have been. Being a mental peeping Tom wasn't as much a problem as having some kind of secret agenda from on high. Again.

And there was something sad about the idea of Cass not being able to dream. He was how old, exactly, and the man had never had a dream of his own in all that time? They may not seem like that big of a deal on the face of them, but just trying to imagine going through life without those odd, half insane fantasies to fill out the night was enough to make Dean feel a little more sympathetic. There was that one guy they had run across years ago, after all, who couldn't dream and it had driven him bat shit crazy. Of course, he was human, slept and all the rest so it was probably a bit different, but still…

"Look," he started, and then hesitated. Gods, what kind of invitation was he about to make? "I don't really like the idea of you lurking around in here," he said at last, and Cass blinked, nearly looking away but managing to remain steady. "But it's not right that you can't dream. Everyone should have those, if nothing else. I think… I think if you gave me a little warning first…" he sighed, bit at his tongue. Ah, what the hell? "Then I wouldn't mind if you came in from time to time, to share some dreams. If, you know, you still want to try them out."

It was interesting watching the slow dawn of comprehension light up Cass's face. As his expression went from one of discomfiture to puzzlement, to wonder and disbelief, and finally to… something else. Something soft and happy that left a smile on his face.

Dean smiled back and went to sit beside him on the bench. There wasn't much going on in the dream now, but it wasn't often he had visitors. Before he woke, he might as well enjoy some down time with his friend.

…

A/N2: Yes, I spell Castiel's nickname as 'Cass' rather than 'Cas.' This isn't because it's the official way to spell it, and I'm not fighting to get it recognized as the proper way to spell his name – I'm not aiming to start any fan wars, here. It's just that I watch the show with subtitles and read the books, and his name is always spelled as 'Cass,' and I've gotten used to it. And personally I think it looks more balanced with two 'S's. I'm fine with anyone's personal choices as to how they spell it, and it doesn't bother me to read it as 'Cas,' I just prefer 'Cass' when writing it out. :)

Thanks for reading, everyone!