I guess I'm still jonesing for some AlastairxDean [platonically] after all. XD So...we'll see what happens with this, because I really want to play with Dark!Dean.

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"That's right, Dean. Ease her in slow. Take your time, enjoy it."

Dean focused his gaze on the subject before him. Once, he would have called her beautiful. She was leggy, with soft-skin and big blue doe eyes that just begged for attention. Curvy, with those pouty lips and a whole mess of hair-the kind he'd liked to run his hands through. And there was her voice, kind of low for a chick, sultry though and gentle.

Well, it had been, anyway. Until her throat had gone raw from screaming.

Dean withdrew the knife he'd inserted under her ribcage with scientific detachment. She screamed and her whole body shuddered. A thick sheen of sweat glistened on her bare skin and he would have found that sort of 'impassioned' state attractive once, just like her. But now it was almost repulsive in the same way that one might find an animal cute, until they'd seen it strung up by it's own meat.

And that's what these souls were. Meat. To be carved up, roasted, sliced, diced, and spat out again good as new. He didn't make the rules, he just played by them. That was the only way to go from being 'meat' to being 'substance'.

Alastair instructed him to enjoy it. He didn't, not really, but there was some satisfaction to his promotion in the status quo.

Dean had worked on her long enough, there were other fish to fry. By now, the woman was a mess in her own skin. Just a bloody piece of meat, ready to be cooked. Dean prepared the meats, but it wasn't his job to cook them up, so-

"Next." Dean's voice was void of emotion, void of pleasure or pain, void of anything really. It was a command that a lesser being might have called 'chilling', but that the demon in charge of keeping up Dean's supply found perfectly acceptable.

"No! No, please! No!" The woman's scream was shrill and she sobbed as she was jerked off of the rack. The demon who pulled her dug his fingers into one of her newly-made slices and she shrieked as she was dragged away.

A man was placed before Dean. Average height, on the pudgy side and somewhat balding. He was a sleezy, business suit-type, not that he had anything on at the moment.

The demon assisting the process smirked. "Fresh meat. Sold his soul to keep his corporation successful. Also has a fancy for jail bait in the single digits, if you catch my drift. Several of those feminine baits are now baiting worms."

Now, truth be told, what did it really matter what sins a slab of meat had committed? And what the Hell did it matter to a demon or a damned soul anyway?

But the demon had to get his kicks somehow, and he'd worked with Dean long enough to know that cases like this...piqued Dean's more creative tendencies-and thus provided him with far better entertainment. So it was worth indulging Dean's kinky [as he saw them] habits.

Dean, whose expression had been professionally blank-kid learned quick-flicked his gaze up to the demon before him and then the man on the rack. The man had wet himself, the filth, and he was babbling something about all the things he'd give and could do-if he'd just be set free-pleading, begging for mercy, threatening too-in the way one might expect from cowardly pieces of shit.

Dean understood loud and clear. The man before him liked little girls, and his 'liking' had turned deadly.

Which meant that Dean's mistrations were going to be...excelling.

"Please! Let me go! I'm begging you! I'll do anything!"

"Anything?" Dean's voice was still blank, matching his gaze as he tilted his dulled green eyes on the man before him.

"Yes! Yes! Just please let me go!"

Dean seemed to consider that a moment as he picked up a screw-driver shaped object from the table. It had little razors potruding from it at all angles, and he spun it around in his hand idly before he looked back at the man. "Is that what they asked you?"

"What?" The man didn't understand as his flabby body quivered.

"The girls. Is that what they asked you?"

The man paled several shades before he seemed to grow flustered. "I-I don't know what you're talking about! Please, just let me-"

The little screwdriver object found it's way into the flesh of the man's upper thigh as Dean twisted it and then jerked it out. Blood pooled as the man began to scream and Dean calmly brandished the tool before the man's face.

"Try again. Is that what they asked you?"

"Y-You're crazy! You slime! You'll pay f-for-"

This time, the screwdriver found purchase slanted in the man's chest flab, where Dean jerked it sideways and the man shrieked.

"Next time, this goes through your tongue. Is that what they-"

"Yes!" The man half-gasped, half-cried the word. "They begged me. They were disgusting and sniveling and...agh! Please! I never meant to hurt them!"

"No? Just take them because you wanted them, right?"

"You don't understand." the man moaned.

"You're right. I don't understand what makes shit like you tick. But we're gonna find out." Dean abandoned the tool in favor of a scalpel as he made his way towards the man. "First, though, I think we'd better get rid of the the little dick downstairs." Those words had a literal and figurative meaning that made the man's screaming start anew.

...

"He really has potential, doesn't he? " Alastair's voice was almost proud as he watched Dean with something like greedy anticipation. He couldn't help it. Dean was an enigma. What had started out as tearing apart the Righteous Man for the 'big plan' had turned into a fascination that he couldn't deny. Dean had lasted thirty years. Never, save for Dean's father and a few very rare exceptions had a human lasted a year. Let alone John's hundred, let alone Dean's thirty. It had been centuries since he'd had an apprentice that could even come close to his own talent and ease. Dean was a hunter, like it or not, he knew his way around a weapon.

And, in the same vein, he damn well knew what to do to make it hurt.

The demon beside him, a former apprentice of Alastair, eyed Dean with something like curiosity. "And to think, he's Heaven's great Righteous Man. Those bird-brains upstairs are bigger idiots than I could have imagined."

Alastair's lips quirked in amusement as Dean 'decapitated' the man he was working on. He had a way with the scalpel. Artful, really. "Who knows...when it's over, maybe Dean here will be playing for our team."

The demon beside him snorted. "Yeah, and maybe one of those bird-brains will join the party. All that potential, wasted on the crazy-guy. He still wants to pretend he's some kind of hero. He only gets this good when he's dealing with that kind of trash."

"Potential is potential." Alastair disagreed. "And besides...I personally find madness to be a very appealing trait."

"Sentimentalist."

Alastair chuckled in reply, content to watch Dean's latest blood-batch unfold. The boy had started out so...unwilling. All full of that 'Righteousness', perhaps? But in the end, he'd broken, and once he'd discarded his humanity and all that it implied, he'd become...quite the prodigy. True, his penchant for 'just' torture was a bit...unappealing. But he made up for his poor taste with the sheer skill and grace of his work. Dean's sloppy start had graduated to something highly valuable indeed. So yes, he could certainly spare the time to watch. His next appointment, the evisceration of an egoist priest from late Vienna, wouldn't be for another hour or so anyway.

...

The man before him should have been dead at least ten times over: but this was Hell, so the little shit was still kicking. Albeit sans a few organs, an ear, the tip of his nose, and several portions of skin and muscle, and plus the little parasitic worm he'd shoved into the man's stomach. Hell was full of little beasties like that.

The man had all but lost his voice amidst his screaming and begging, and he watched the man's stomach churn as what was left of his organs were slowly consumed.

Dean examined his tools a moment before he plucked a fork-shaped object from the table. He'd discovered that if done correctly, the eye could still see and perceive images even when detached from it's socket.

And that it was painful beyond all reasoning.

Dean found himself humming a Metallica tune as he headed for the man, just one of the little quirks of the 'other Dean' [as he considered him sometimes] that popped up occasionally. He didn't remember much about the old Dean. As in, the man he'd been before Hell. Dean had some vague notion of him, and that he was in fact, technically him. There were memories as well, distant though they were. But it was like looking at a photograph of himself he couldn't remember having been taken. It was him, undeniably, irrefutably, but he wouldn't have said so if the evidence hadn't been there. The concept of being that man was too outlandish, too full of hope and regret and pain, too full of that puppy-eyed little brother named 'Sammy'. The only name that ever came to him with any real clarity.

That Dean had been full of a whirlwind of emotions and burdens. He'd been utterly devoted to his family, generally so to his friends, and willing to sacrifice himself for a greater good that was vastly beyond his comprehension.

This Dean couldn't understand the feelings. He'd detached himself from them and from the Other Dean. This Dean ran on survival instincts and self-preservation, along with the occasional bits of power-play. Because, admittedly, it was a bit intoxicating to be on the top. To be the one dealing pain instead of receiving.

But whenever a man like this came along, he always went the extra mile. This Dean supposed that it was a trait left over from the Other Dean. Something slid into his stomach, a sick, leaden feeling that made him want to lash out when someone like this entered his grasp. Anger, maybe, if he could have felt it. Disgust. Revulsion. The desire to correct the...wrongness that he found there.

But right and wrong had no place in Hell, so he didn't bother thinking on it.

Instead, he allowed himself the strange satisfaction he got at inflicting pain on those sorts in particular. He supposed that that was 'justice' to the Other Dean and placated the bits of him that must of remained buried somewhere inside of him. A balm to that bleeding, injured soul he couldn't comprehend, and didn't dare touch upon.

Still. As Dean stood before the man before him and brandished the fork, quite desensitized to what remained of his screaming and his convulsive writhing, he had to admit...

Sometimes...he really did enjoy his job.

...

So...not exactly DeanXAlastair. [Al's into voyeur, apparently XD] And more...Hell!Dean than Dark!Dean...And maybe pretty gruesome, although I tried to keep it from being too much so. This is pretty much how I view Dean in Hell, I guess. Sort of. Maybe just a possibility. He just gave in to basic instinct and sort of shoved his humanity and memories into the corner. But being that he's Dean, flickers of the man he was still come out occasionally. Like when he's torturing the real bad guys. And then he when he dug himself out of the grave, he'd gotten forcibly thrust out of his corner with all that added torment built in. Or something. I'd like to think of it that way, as opposed to Dean just being a heartless dick or something, and I can't imagine that he could have had much emotion while he was torturing, he would have tried to ignore it anyway. Dean can be pretty cold when he wants to. He's a hunter, after all. XD And Sam still haunts him most of all in the back of his mind.

I dunno. I tried. So please enjoy. Or pretend to. And leave me verbal hugs and such, if you feel so inclined. [And don't want to make Sammy cry because his brother's pain is being ignored? Or something?] XD It will balance out all of the soul-crushing angst I dipped into writing this. XD -Witchy