Welcome to my annual birthday challenge. Every year, I do a self-imposed gauntlet of writing and posting one fic every day until my birthday, one story for each year. I began this tradition for my twentieth birthday by writing a twenty-story anthology, "Twenty Questions." This was themed around Sam asking Dean questions, from the time they were kids through to when they grew up. "Twenty-One Bottles of Beer on the Wall" was a twenty-first birthday gift to myself, centered around alcohol (obviously).
This year's theme (twenty-second b-day!) is guns. Enter lots and lots of man-angst, hurt!Dean, hurt!Sam, hurt/comfort, a little horror, a bit of cuteness, and a smidge of humor (because I can't seem to write anything without making it a tiny bit twisted/funny). Basically, it's just me indulging myself and writing whatever the heck I want.
So here goes! Fire your engines…
Bang!
(That was the starting gun, in case you didn't get it…*is lame*)
Enjoy!
Summary: Guns aren't allowed in Hell. Title from Hamlet. Graphic descriptions of torture and implied suicidal tendencies. Ya know, the usual. Season 4.
The Play's the Thing
Guns aren't allowed in Hell. They're too quick, kill too easily.
Knives are better. Knives slice. Knives carve. Knives can dig out the slippery-squishy ping-pong ball that is your eye and leave the lid (which, incidentally, has the thinnest outer layer of skin on the entire body, except for on the female clitoris) intact.
Knives allow you to play with your food, metaphorically speaking.
Not to say that a gun doesn't instill fear in the guy at the other end of it. The click of the gears as it's cocked, the bug-eyed stare up the barrel of it, the big BANG! as it goes off - they're scary all right, but guns really just don't let you flaunt the type of finesse that comes from wielding a blade.
In the hand of someone who really knows how to use it, a knife can be a truly terrifying sight. (Oh yes, Hell likes its torturing to have a personal touch.)
Guns kill. The cheesy slogan's got a completely new meaning in Hell. Guns are mercy, guns are compassion, guns are freedom from the agony of a pair of tweezers gently, slowly, carefully, squeezing your spleen until it pops with a splash of green bile.
In Hell, your body grows back, piece by piece. A toe here, a liver there (if Dean had had the attention or energy to do so, he would have compared the situation to Prometheus', but he hadn't, and anyway, that shit's too geeky for his level of coolness anyway) - it all grows back, slowly, painfully, until it's all there again, the human body in all its imperfect magnificence.
It hurts, but not nearly as much as the actual torture does, nowhere near as much. That's why every soul on the rack begs for mercy, begs for the bullet to the head. It hurts less. It's faster, oh, so much quicker than the slow shredding of skin, skinning, peeling, digging.
BAM! and it's over. The luxury of the regrowth is something every soul looks forward to. They pray their body will take its time rebuilding itself, but always, always, the process goes by too quickly. Much, much too quickly.
Nevertheless, the break from the immeasurable agony is like Heaven, their own little patch of Heaven right there in Hell.
Dean wishes it could be like that again. He wishes he could have something like it to look forward to again. But he doesn't.
All he has is a brother who is never in his bed when Dean wakes up in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat, shaking, voice raw with screaming from the nightmares that plague him even when he's awake.
All he has is his gun. His gun. He wants to feel that again, the longing for the terrible mercy of the bullet.
He'll never have that feeling again. He knows it, like a drug addict knows he'll never again have a high as great as his first. Up here, alive again, the torture, in his dreams and waking, it never stops, never slows down, never eases.
Dean puts the gun against his head and weeps.
AN: Each review is a trick candle on my birthday cake. If you want to see me wheeze trying to blow them out, click the little button!