Man, this was some kind of something to write. The agony and the ecstasy, my friends, that's what it was.
There is some violence and torture in this fic, and some, shall we called it "ideologically sensitive" material? It's certainly not the most graphic thing you'll see on this site (or probably on this particular page of fics) but I like to be thorough.
And, just a time note, this would take place either very, very early in the Supernatural series, or just a little pre-series.
The devil, depend upon it, can sometimes do a very gentlemanly thing.- Robert Louis Stevenson
The blade scraped along the whetstone, producing a rhythmic rasp that could easily become hypnotic. It was a motion of perfect monotony. Back and forth, steady, symmetrical, without variation. Powered by a hand that had performed the motion practically forever, a hand that knew how to hone a razor to such an edge it could split a single cell. Or skin a victim without touching the muscle and fat beneath.
"There's an art to knives, and I don't mean in just using them. In maintaining them, too. Knives are like any other tool. You need to take care of them, and they'll take care of you. Neglect your tools, and, well, let me show you what happens."
The man, though man he was not, set the sharpened knife and whetstone down on a worktable. From the same table he retrieved a knife that looked like it had been repeatedly hit with a brick, its once-keen edge reduced to a series of uneven serrations.
"This is what happens to a good tool in the hands of an amateur. An amateur who prefers flash over substance, who thinks the meaner a knife looks, the better it works. An amateur who isn't going to be seeing much of his limbs for a very long time."
With a sigh, the man brought the ruined knife closer to his prey. The prey began to bleat and writhe like the severed segments of a worm. It rattled its chains.
"You're only acting like that because you don't know any better. You can't tell the work of a master from the work of a failed apprentice. Don't worry, though, because you've got an eternity to develop a better sense of refinement. Starting…now."
The man who was not a man pressed the knife to his prey's naked shoulder. There was no blood, no penetration, just a deep impression into the skin.
"Do you see what I mean? A good knife applied with that much pressure should have cut you clean to the clavicle. I couldn't threaten a balloon with this crap." Disgusted, the monster withdrew the ruined knife and stalked back to his worktable. He tossed down the knife with a clatter and picked up the blade he'd so carefully stropped.
This time the skin split almost on contact. It was effortless, like cutting air.
"That's the difference craftsmanship makes. A little work, a little care, a lot of practice, and the results are worlds apart."
The demon slid the knife along his prey's collarbone, tracing his way down the bone's gentle curvature. When he ran out of clavicle, he continued the downward slope and began following the prey's breast.
"I know these got you plenty of attention topside. Down here, with me, they're perky nerve endings."
The prey showed the first hint of consciousness at this statement. Before, every word and touch had been met with stupid, animal fear. No intelligence, nothing beyond what a sheep with a broken leg or a frog in a snake's mouth could have displayed. Now it had managed a quick shake of the head, a purely human expression of denial.
Maybe the shock of finding itself in Hell, chained like the ultimate bondage enthusiast, was starting to wear off. Not that it ever wore off completely, not really, not even when they forgot their humanity and their eyes went black and…
Right, this one wasn't human. And black was one of the more boring colors its eyes had been.
Alastair grinned.
"Oh, I'm sure to you and all those notches on your bedpost they're more. They must be, or you wouldn't have spent all those lives so fixated on them. With you, it was always physical. Maybe because there's nothing inside you at all."
By no act of coincidence, the knife that had been migrating down the prey's chest was, at that moment, poised over the soft and vulnerable belly. Alastair plunged it in up to the hilt. The prey shrieked and blood boiled up around the knife.
"I meant that more metaphorically."
"What are you even talking about?" the prey wailed. "Why are you doing this to me?"
Alastair sat down on the edge of the rack in a perverted parody of a parent sitting on a child's bedside. He reached over and plucked the knife from his prey's viscera. The prey convulsed.
"You know well enough why I'm doing this. Because you deserve it. Because you earned it. And because I don't like you. There's that selfish reason, too, but don't tell anyone. I like to pretend I'm a man of principles." Alastair chuckled, and his laugh rasped like his voice.
"But I don't deserve it! I've never done anything—"
"Of course you have! Believe me, I didn't hunt you down for your good looks. I hunted you down because your sins are, well, something unique. And because you gave a hell of a good chase. Most people are easy to catch; you just wait for the reaper or hellhound to drop the soul in your lap. You, you required a little more patience and cunning."
Tears welled up in the prey's eyes—eyes that, incidentally, had changed colors from the start of the program and were now a shade of purple Liz Taylor couldn't have beaten. A single tear fell from the prey's eyelashes and trickled down its face. The prey's ruby-red lips trembled. Its bosom heaved.
Alastair yawned. "That's not going to work on me."
The prey whimpered and another preternaturally perfect tear ran from the opposite eye. This tear followed a reflective trail of the first tear, and the prey's face was left with symmetrical moist, glistening tracks.
Alastair had seen a lot of crying and carrying on during his long tenure as hell's nastiest nasty, but this was something new on him. Who cried like that, one single tear at a time, and from alternating eyes? He'd been expecting weird things, like the chameleonic eye color, but the impossibly dainty crying, that was just ridiculous.
"Remind me again how anyone found you attractive," Alastair said.
Despite the wound in its belly and the fresh tears on its perfect, flushed cheeks, the prey looked positively chipper to talk about this subject. Alastair fingered his knife and prepared to slide it across his plaything's throat should it grow a little too loquacious.
"I can make anyone love me!" the prey announced.
"Except me," Alastair amended drily.
A little of the luster left the prey's now-topaz eyes. "Except you?"
"Yes, except me. I wouldn't find myself attracted to you if you were this 'righteous man' I've been waiting for since the beginning of time. Now please continue digging your grave."
"But I've got something for everyone! Heroes feel a kinship to my tragic and mysterious past. Villains—who aren't all that bad, really, just misunderstood—love me because my madness matches theirs. I'm the piece they never even knew was missing, and once they find me, we can rule together, or I can heal them, or—" The prey trailed off when it caught the look Alastair was giving it.
"I am not misunderstood," the demon said. "And I would rather be stranded at the South Pole with only archangels for company than to rule with you. Or to let you try and heal me."
The prey—Alastair was beginning to wonder if it didn't need a new name, like the delusional wide-eyed chatterbox—actually had the audacity to reach a chained hand toward the demon. He considered slicing it off, but before he could get himself a personal version of Thing, the chains pulled taut.
"But you must be misunderstood. You were probably a loving family man who had no choice but to sell his soul to save his sick grandmother or to bring back his dead wife. And then you went to hell, and you resisted for years and years, but finally your spirit broke, and to placate your evil masters, you started torturing people. It isn't your fault at all."
Alastair was fond of the well-placed evil chuckle, but his unconstrained, full-bodied laugh echoing around hell was about as rare as slurpees in the underworld. The sound roused plenty of attention from demons going about their business, and, depending on the demon, its temperament, and its standing with Alastair, garnered a plethora of reactions. Some demons bolted, thinking the undisputed king of torture had discovered some new level of pain and would soon come looking for more victims, namely demons who'd pissed him off. Other demons, the ones who did not perceive themselves on Alastair's shit-list, grew curious. The ballsier ones considered poking their nose into Alastair's private domain, but in the end they all decided satisfying their curiosity wasn't worth the world, galaxy, and potential universe of suffering Alastair could inflict on them.
"I'm sorry, but are you serious? Even by your standards, that is grasping. I was no family man; in life I made the most depraved Roman emperor look like a good babysitter. I murdered, I mutilated, I pillaged, I raped, I tortured, I burned villages to the ground, and I earned my spot in hell with my own bloody hands. Lilith, first demon, daughter of the Devil himself, saw my work upstairs and she chose me. She had to do a little modification to make me truly fit the role, but I'd say it was well worth it."
The prey shook its pretty little head fiercely, like an irate horse. Its long black hair, resplendent with a rainbow of random color streaks, swished back and forth in a way that paid no mind to gravity or physics. Alastair waited for the ridiculous hair to settle down before he continued.
"And we both know my story isn't unique. All these bad boys of yours—there're too many to name, but feel free to insert your favorite—are the same way. Maybe their lives were hard, maybe mommy and daddy didn't hug them enough, maybe their classmates locked them in the janitor's closet. That isn't, like you seem to think, a get out of jail free card. If it was, every criminal who ever got called 'fat-ass' in the locker-room would be a free man."
"That isn't close to what happened to them! You're, you're—"
"Attacking a straw-man?" Alastair suggested.
"Yeah! It was way worse than not being hugged! They were abused, or abandoned, or had to live in their big brother's shadow all their lives! You can't blame them for what they grew up to be!"
Alastair looked down at his prey and hummed thoughtfully. He considered the indignant, bloodied creature and then, abruptly, hopped off the rack. Leaving his prey to strain its neck as it tried to follow his movements, the demon strolled around the torture chamber, picking up various items as he went.
From twenty feet away, Alastair said, "Let's do some role-playing."
"I don't wanna."
"I don't care."
Alastair returned, a bundle wrapped in cloth supported in his arms. He laid the bundle on the table nearest the rack, and unwrapped it. Using the wrapping like a tablecloth, the demon arranged his new toys.
"This is going to look like cosplay gone bad, but use what little imagination you have," Alastair said.
Included amongst the objects Alastair had collected was a small bowl that contained a handful of fine black ash. The demon dipped two fingers into the bowl and then circled each eye with ash, hollowing his gaunt face even further. He then brushed his hands together to shake off the excess powder.
"Need a bit of red. You wouldn't mind lending me some?" Alastair asked.
"I don't own anything red," the prey replied. "I don't own anything at all since you kidnapped me and chained me up and…" The third complaint died with a long, teary sniff. Though he didn't see it, Alastair imagined a crystalline, perfect tear slipping from the prey's eyes.
The demon turned from his worktable and faced his weepy toy. It stared at him like a cow. He reached a hand toward it and it made a noise rather like a cow in distress.
A quick swipe of his artist's fingers across the prey's abdomen and Alastair had enough red to finish his look. He outlined his lips with the stolen blood, the red standing out against his pale skin almost as severely as the black ash. Once he was finished applying the macabre lipstick, he popped one bloodied finger into his mouth and sucked on the digit.
Almost as soon as the finger entered his mouth, the demon made a face that suggested he'd bitten into one of Mrs. Lovett's infamous meat pies. He hastily removed the finger and spat. When that didn't clean the taste, he spat again and then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
"I think we can put to rest any hopes you had of bagging yourself a well-groomed and brooding creature of the night. Unless he doesn't have taste buds. Which I'm wishing I didn't."
Alastair cleared his throat, though it was evidenced by the grimace he wore that he still hadn't entirely rid himself of the awful taste. "Let's forget pansy vampires for now. Hell, let's forget them forever and talk about the reason I dolled myself up."
The demon hoisted himself onto the rack again, only this time instead of sitting on the edge, he crept across the surface until he was astride his prey. To pretend the position looked anything but pornographic, a person would have to either be three years old or blind. And once the prey began to pant and whimper, even the blind would have gotten aboard.
"Get off me!" the prey cried.
"What's wrong? I know you hate me, and I'm an evil, hell-bound son of a bitch, but that never stopped you before. In fact, you seem to think this sort of thing," Alastair pressed himself even tighter to his prey's body, "is sure to lead to a happy and consensual relationship."
"It wasn't like this before! I always knew that they were sorry, and guilty, and that if I forgave them, we could grow to love each other."
Alastair deadpanned, "There are Republicans who have a better grasp of rape than you do."
"But—"
"Maybe I'm still not getting deep enough. Do I have to go a little more The Devil in Miss Jones before you get the picture?" The demon grinned lasciviously and for a moment he thought his prey was about to faint.
A quick slap averted that little crisis and brought the prey back to full consciousness.
"Doesn't that just make you wanna snuggle?" Alastair asked as his prey blinked back the tears that threatened to cascade from its otherworldly, incandescent jade eyes.
When the prey didn't respond, Alastair continued, "I don't know what the problem is. Sure, this meat-suit isn't the most handsome thing you've ever had climb on top of you—you try wearing something for 60 years and then we'll talk—but look, I brush my teeth." The demon smiled, revealing teeth that, while potentially profitable to a privateering orthodontist, would not send the average dentist into histrionics. "Which is more than I can say about half the filthy degenerates I watched you screw. Wait, is that the problem? Am I too clean? Does scurvy turn you on?"
The prey shook its head, and Alastair noted with private satisfaction that its wild hair didn't flutter all over the place this time. It still wasn't quite tied to Newton's laws of motion, but a little of the magic foolishness had been drained away.
"I didn't think that was it, but hey, everyone's got their kinks, and I'm the last person who should judge." Alastair laughed at his own in-joke. "No, I think the issue is you were always looking at the world through rose-tinted glasses. You weren't playing in the blood and the stink and rotting teeth. You were playing in the chiseled abs and excitement and, you know." The demon pointed a finger downward, to where his body met his prey's naked one.
"That's not true! I saw people die, and I got hurt, and I worried about my future, too," the prey said.
"You rode Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyland and thought you were ready to take on the British navy. I watched you waltz from world to world, and you were never once really human. Sometimes you tried—and it was hilarious, don't get me wrong, watching you play at being flesh and bone—but mostly you didn't bother."
"But I've always been human—"
"Except for when you've been an elf, alien, vampire, werewolf, demon, angel, goddess, mermaid, or any combination of the above," Alastair interrupted. "Oh, and for the record, no, you can't be half angel, half demon, and half human. Unless you've got half a creature grafted on to you somewhere, and I'm not seeing one."
The prey blushed and Alastair almost raised his fist and shook it in victory. "Sometimes I'm bad at math…"
Alastair dissolved into laughter again. The prey squirmed beneath him; in his mirth, Alastair rocked gently back and forth, the motion rubbing his body against his prey's.
"Bad at math! Bad at math!" the demon recited. "I can't believe it! A genuine flaw!"
The prey couldn't find breath to respond until Alastair stopped with his inadvertently (or so the prey prayed) stimulating movements. Once the demon stilled, the prey said, "I have flaws."
It was almost, almost enough to get Alastair laughing all over again. He had to think of terribly un-funny things—smiling children, cures for life-threatening diseases, subzero temperatures—to keep himself quiet.
"Right, in the same way you have blood. Being clumsy or too beautiful isn't a flaw, it's a bitch whining for attention," Alastair said. "But thinking three halves equals one, that's a real flaw."
"Then I do have flaws and I'm human and you can let me go!" the prey cried.
Not even the thought of penguins freezing in an Antarctic blizzard could dam the laughter this time. Alastair threw his head back and brayed. He hadn't laughed this hard since the September 11th hijackers had started looking for their 72 virgins!
Alastair liked to think of himself as disciplined, but it still took him several minutes to clamp down on the last of his giggles. Once he finally put the stopper in the bottle, he shook his head, still smiling, and said, "I'm more human than you, and look at me! You aren't even properly alive. You're an idea. A trope. A sad, sad fantasy."
The prey began to snivel, making hiccupping little sobs that conveyed not a shred of poise, dignity, or hope. The immaculate, perfect tear trickling from each eye was gone. Alastair again felt like fist-pumping. Now he was getting somewhere!
"What are you doing to me?" the prey sobbed. If its crying had been ugly before, the second wave was about as attractive as tertiary syphilis.
It was difficult to tell if the prey had become aware of the changes within itself—the subdued hair, the messy, mascara-ruining crying, the increasingly banal eyes—or if it was asking a broader question. Not that the two were entirely unrelated.
"I'm carving you into a new animal," Alastair replied. That more-or-less covered either scenario.
The prey's sniveling abruptly broke like a thirteen-year-old boy's voice and changed from whimpering into jagged, full-throated sobs. If crying could be measured on the same scale as tornadoes, this would be a monstrous F-5.
When someone cried like that, there was very little that was going to reach them. Luckily, Alastair had seen more weeping than all of Earth's grief counselors combined, and knew a few tricks for getting through to people who were otherwise engulfed in their own misery.
Physical pain happened to be the trick he found most effective.
Using his somewhat underwhelming costume as his muse, Alastair eased himself off his prey—if the prey noticed the loss, it didn't show—and strolled back over to the collection of toys he'd amassed earlier. Maybe he'd subconsciously been planning it all out, because the right tool for the job was the one within easiest reach. Alastair picked up the unassuming knife and returned to the rack. He didn't straddle his prey this time, but remained standing beside it.
"See, it all comes full circle. Like I said earlier, a knife doesn't have to look imposing for me to work my magic with it," Alastair said.
Hurricane Prey continued to bawl with the force of a thousand wet babies. Lost in that whirlwind of water and noise, the prey was oblivious to Alastair's speech, never mind any specifics contained within.
Noting that he was being ignored, or not heard at all, Alastair reached out and prodded his prey on the shoulder. He might as well have tried to get the moon's attention by shouting at it one night. A little finger-jab was not going to penetrate into that super-storm.
A quick poke from a finger couldn't do the trick, but sliding the knife into the corner of the prey's mouth was enough to cut off the crying as efficiently as plugging a bottle with a cork.
The prey, its chest heaving, stared at Alastair with impossibly wide—but not impossibly colorful—eyes. He took a moment to celebrate the prey's perfectly ordinary brown eyes, and then gave his pitiful victim a smile that would have made Lilith shiver.
"Why so serious?" Alastair asked.
With a dexterous twitch of his wrist he drove the knife forward, splitting his prey's cheek like an overripe peach. Before the pain signals could reach the prey's brain and be deciphered, the demon flashed the blade a second time, creating an identical gaping slash on the other side of the mouth.
The proceeding scream was one of the lovelier sounds Alastair had ever heard. It echoed through the darkest corners of Hell in much the same way Alastair's laughter had earlier, only the scream was a familiar and comforting sound to the formerly unnerved demons. They elbowed each other like friends at a bar telling illicit jokes, and knew all was right with the world. And with Alastair. Which was much more important, since the world at large didn't have the most impressive collection of instruments of torture ever assembled on any plain of being.
The screams continued to bounce around in Alastair's head like the most triumphant music even as the demon turned his back on his prey. Likewise, Alastair just couldn't stop smiling. He'd been torturing people, well, for as long as there'd been people, really, and it wasn't every day he discovered something new and fresh enough to entertain him. But that bloody grin, that was really something. The pain alone was enough to give the victim fits, but the mutilation factor, boy, that clown knew how to make a statement.
Alastair wiped the soot from around his eyes and flaked the dried blood from his mouth. He couldn't wait to see what inspiration his prey's multitude of other lovers and madmen offered. The list was so long they really could play together forever.
The End.