AN: Hi, sorry for my lack of updating, but I've been very busy packing the last few weeks and I haven't had time to really write anything, but hopefully I'll be able to get back to it soon :)


At first, the soul keeps saying his name over and over like it was chanting a prayer. He hadn't recognized it for weeks, it had just sounded like a made up word but it struck him one day that it was familiar. A month after that he realized it was his name.

Dean. He hasn't heard that name in thirty god forsaken years. But he knows now that it is his name, he is Dean, and he wonders if getting his name back is just another torture devised to break him.

"Dean, put the knife down" the soul begged six months in. No, that isn't right, the soul wasn't begging, it was telling. He didn't like being told what to do, didn't like that a soul on his rack would make a demand. So he didn't put the knife down, he used it to make bloody art out of the soul's skin.

After three years he realizes that this is not a normal soul. Every day it tells him to put the knife down, and not once has it begged for mercy, and it screams rarely. It makes low grunts of pain and it has torn through its lip with its teeth more times than he can count, but it only screams when he tries very hard for the sound, when he performs some of Azazel's very special tortures that he had been subjected too for thirty years.

The soul hasn't gone mad from the pain, which is another thing that clues him in to the soul's abnormality. He had a few others on his rack before this one, but they'd break after a few months and then he'd find a new one, fresh to the pain, strapped to his rack waiting for him. But this one. He's had it for almost five years now and it is still as lucid at the end of the day as it was when it first appeared on his rack.

These are not the only things that set it apart. It's very bright when everything else in this place is dark and dull. It shines with a light beneath its skin and as hard as he tried to cut into it to find the source he just can't. And he searches oh so very thoroughly.

It still tells him to put down the knife, and even though he can't the words don't make him so angry anymore. After it's been on the rack for seven years Dean finds he wants to do what it tells him. But still he resists.

He's been torturing souls for almost ten years, eight of them spent on this one, and he thinks maybe the rest of eternity will see him carving patterns into the skin of this soul, taking out pieces and putting them back differently, breaking bones and hurting the soul in every conceivable way.

The soul looks at him one day, it's blue eyes cutting into him deeper than any of Azazel's tool.

"Dean, put the knife down."

Dean blinks. He stands completely still in front of the impossible soul.

He puts the knife down.

He wakes up in a grave, and when he meets the angel Castiel a couple of days later, he doesn't recognize the blue eyes staring back at him.