OK, something new from me (Yeah, I know, I know)

The first chapter is gonna be short and slow, so please bear with me. By the way. If you're squeamish. Possibly not the best fic to read…

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Fire. Fire was the beginning and the end. Fire was birth, and death, and everything in between. Fire was warmth, and burning. Fire seared the flesh from his bones, and warmed him when there was nothing else. It consumed everything, and was everything he had ever known. Fire was all Dean Winchester knew, and remembered, and would ever know. The phoenix ends with fire, but is born from the ashes. Fire is a circle.

Everything in hell, the pain, the demons, the torture, it was fire that he despised the most. It was the fire that scalded his very soul, making him forget who he was, stripping him of his humanity. Turning him into a demon. They had started with knives, but he wouldn't break. Carving him into slivers, until he was a living skeleton, and then, when the demon, when Alistair clicked his fingers, he was whole, and the agony started again. Alistair. Even the name made him shudder, sending shivers through him. Everything about him made Dean's skin, burned and scarred as it was, crawl. His eyes, obsidian black, bored into Dean. Again and again, he sliced him up, and again and again, he screamed for Sam until his voice was hoarse. But still, he carved, like Dean was a side of beef. Asking him the same question over and over again, every day. And every day, Dean told him to stick it up his ass. Why should today be any different?

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Alistair hummed as he ran his thumb across the knife blade, collecting a drop of blood. He brought his thumb to his mouth. 'I do hate to waste good food,' he drawled to the figure in chains. Dean hung there, limp. Today, Alistair had clicked his fingers, and his minions had appeared, big hulking men with hands like sledgehammers. They had beaten him until he could no longer stand defiant, sagging in his restraints. One eye was swollen shut, and he could no longer hear out of his right ear. A steady trickle of blood ran down his face, trying to blind the other eye. He rubbed his bruised face against an aching shoulder, clearing his vision. There was a dull throb in his hands, feet, right shoulder and left hip, where rusty, but still deadly sharp, hooks had pierced his flesh for the first time, over thirty years ago. He could hear the blood rushing around his body, the pain where they had broken each rib individually, constricting his lungs smaller each time he breathed raggedly. His kneecaps had been pulverized, and every time he shifted his weight, pain twinged around his entire body.

'So, what do you say Dean?' Dean shuddered at the sound of that voice, and immediately regretted it, the movement sending pain crackling up and down his shattered spine 'Fancy seeing life from the other side of the scalpel?'

Ever since the hell hounds had come for him, Dean had been able to see what demons really looked like. The backdrop of hell didn't make it any prettier. Alistair was tall, seven or eight feet, and thin, almost skeletal. The raw, cracked skin was stretched too tightly over the bones, peeling in some places, giving Dean a glimpse of pulsing muscle and yellowing bone. His eyes were black, from pupil outwards, just on the surface, and his hair was long and rank, hanging in strands. Puffy lips barely covered rotten teeth, and his face was covered in oozing sores. Dean smirked, ignoring the pain from his broken jaw. 'You're an ugly sonofabitch, aren't you?'

His face contorted at hearing Dean's remark, and he reached for his most used knife, the one with the crest carved into the handle, and, started at the hook in his right shoulder, began carving the skin from his body, filleting him calmly and efficiently. Dean screamed with hoarse lungs, screaming his brother's name, until no sound came out. He sliced small pieces at a time, until soon at his feet lay a heaped pile of bloody scraps, the remains of Dean's skin.

The demon pushed his face into Deans, breathing its fetid breath at him. 'What about now, Dean? Will you say yes now?'

'Never,' he rasped, his empty stomach heaving at the smell of rotten meat and death that emanated from this creature, this harbinger of death.

'I beg to differ,' he leered and thrust forward, his small, hooked blade piercing Dean's lungs. What little air he had gathered was lost in the stale heat as he gasped and writhed, the hooks tugging on his parched and cracked skin, suffocating slowly, watching the pleasure contorting Alistair's already deformed and hideous visage.

And suddenly, the fire returned, orange flames licking at his entire body, engulfing him. What skin that hadn't been sliced off crisped and burned, the muscles and bones charring and collapsing into dust. And still Dean felt the pain. Rags of skin and bone hung from the hooks, a skeletal Dean cowed and beaten, broken?

'Come on Dean,' whined the demon. 'As much as I love doing this, I need a protégé, someone for me to share the tricks of the trade with. That person will be you Dean. It's just a matter of time. So why not save yourself the pain, and say yes. Just one, little, miniscule, word…' He clicked his fingers, and Dean was whole again, gasping for breath he no longer needed, his skin fresh and pink, newly regrown. A trickle on blood ran from each hook, as it had in the beginning, on the first day on the rack. His head hung forward. He loathed himself for this weakness, but he couldn't do this anymore. He was a coward, taking the coward's way out. He was no better than the lowest of the low, worse than a demon.

'Yes,'

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Just something I thought I'd throw out there. I would say enjoy, but it's not really enjoyable writing. You know what I mean.

Quick pimping!

Fighting For Salvation, Fighting For Redemption, night-star-93. Brand new, but already AMAZING. Go, read!