The Art of Torture

Before Anything Else:

This fic has been hanging out in my brain ever since I read Hell by Kayzo (aka, Destiel MASTER) which is, in fact, freaking amazingly perfect and you should all read it, especially if you want this to make any sense at all. I highly recommend it. Seriously. So highly. The highest. (She was also brilliant and let me write this, and helped me out. Fantastic!)

Summary:

The man demon Dean left on the rack is out of hell and aching for revenge. Dean's been waiting – constantly, quietly, in the back of his brain – for his arrival and is passive and ready to receive his final punishment. But what does the demon really want from him? What will the demon ask, and how will it break Dean?

Warnings:

Violence, torture, angst, sexualisation of an underage vessel.

"Hello there, Dean Winchester. Lovely day for a little game of Operation, don't you think?"

Dean looks up from his motel bed.

There is a girl in the doorway – a young one, a stranger – with a knife and Dean feels as though he should recognize her; a small part of him knows that if he were to touch this woman's heart with his fingers he'd know her entirety. This part of Dean has maps of the hearts of a million sinners in his slimy metaphorical hands of death and, however reluctant Dean is to acknowledge he has those maps, he knows that part of him is more reluctant to let them go.

He sighs, and wishes the eyes would turn black soon, so he could be sure and certain before he acted.

"You need to work on your opening lines a little, hell spawn. Humans tend to be a little bit of a tougher crowd then the degenerates in the pit."

The demon shrugs, "First night topside in about a hundred or so years. Sorry if my delivery's a little rusty. Now, Dean, this is where you ask me what someone like me is doing in a girl like this," and the demon giggles madly, like this is all some cosmic joke, "Isn't she pretty? I'll tell you a secret Dean, she thinks you're awful pretty! Do you want to hurt her?"

Dean feels sick to his core – the girl can't be more then sixteen years old – but he knows he's done worse to younger children when he was in the pit and that part of him relishes the thought of something so young and fragile under his knife and base fantasies nightmares fly through his head unbidden.

She moves closer – too close – and hitches her bright pink night dress up to her stomach, "Do you want to fuck her, Dean?"

But even that dark part of him cringes away from that. No, Dean would never, could never. No. That was too wrong, too young, too much, and the demon laughs.

"Well, aren't you just too precious! The fucking righteous man! Here I was thinking you had no compunctions whatsoever! Where is the filthy moral-less bastard I remember so fondly? You taught me a lot when you tore out my heart which was, you know, cute, by the way," and Dean can't help but feel offended, irritated, that his work, his art (he cringes away from the word) is being maligned by this posturing, whorish asshole dressing up in a teenage girls and he feels his lungs getting ready to empty themselves in his defense when the demon raises her hand.

"Shut up, Dean, or I'll saw your vocal chords into six. Oh yes, you taught me that trick too. Now, as I was saying," she bends over and breaths into Dean's mouth, "you've done me a favor."

The demon pauses, and waits for the words to sink in, too land on Dean Winchesters lips with all the force of déjà vu, of remembrance.

Dean can feel the memory of those exact words leaving his own tongue once, a long time ago, and his mouth runs dry. There's an empty swallow and a teenage girl's favorite winning smile, "Ah, there we are Dean. Do you know me now?"

Dean knows he shouldn't, but the demon is a bitch and a demon so he props himself on his elbows and smirks at her, "Why would I? You were on a production line, baby. Fifty souls by the end of each day and you just become a number. It sucks, but that's the system for you. Commercialism was pretty much born in hell. Ask anyone."

The demon's eyes harden before they finally finally turn black. It looks angry, annoyed, hurt even. It raises one blond eyebrow in Dean's direction, "Oh yes, I know you. Alistair's little prodigy, used to rack up quite the soul count, you're still a legend downstairs. But me ? I was special. Can't you feel it Dean?"

Dean tries a shrug but it stutters because he can feel it. He knows who she is, he can feel the identity, the connections marked deep inside of them both and there's a flash of a hazel eye in his hand, a flash of white standing behind a broken body and a heart beating beating beating out on the ground.

The white feels like Castiel and he burns because Cas is gone, and the memory of who this is hits him completely, wakes up inside of him and pulls him down into his own head. He wants to stay there, to just let what's about to happen to him happen to him, and so he tries to stay, draw away from the reality of everything but the girl, the demon, David Hopeson, won't let him.

"Well, I'm sure you know why I'm here, so let's get to it. Where's the angel?"

To hear him mention Castiel shocks him back into the present, back into his grief and pain and loss and it hurts more then anything he endured on the rack, anything he thought he might endure here.

"Come now, Dean, you know where he is. Tell me where you're keeping the angel!"

"What – What angel? Which one?"

The girl's eyes are wild, angry – the girl is wild, angry. She grabs Dean's shoulders and her nails sink in like razors, her fingers leave bruises the size of quarters swelling around the cuts, "The one who left me in hell! Tell me where he is!"

Dean can't help it, he laughs. He's crying too but he's laughing, because it's funny that stupid David Hopeson, who used to be an aging pedophile, couldn't tell that the angel he spent so much hate on was gone. That he couldn't feel it in his bones that Castiel had been wiped from existence.

"Oh, come on man. Cas is gone. He isn't coming back." and if he chokes on the words who's there to hear him but some demon bitch?

And the demon laughs, "You honestly believe that? Didn't your dear little God tell you?"

The demon climbs into his lap and looks into Dean's broken eyes, "Oh, Dean. You really don't know where he is, do you?You're so precious. Castiel's in hell. Or, he was. Pulled a Houdini act, so to speak. He was in my charge, but then, poof! He disappeared. Went AWOL from my very own operating table – used to be your operating table actually – and well, I'm here to find him and drag him back down and start up where we left off."

Hope fluttered wildly in Dean's chest. His heart beat out a rhythm of Cas Cas Cas because God help Dean if he could think about a single other thing then the possibility of finding Cas again. Oh God, Cas could be alive, he could be alive dammit.

"Tell you what," drawls the David demon girl, "I'm, well, I'm finding... How would you say it? That I want to 'do you a favor'. How does that sound?"

"I don't want your fucking favors you stupid piece of demon trash," Dean leans up and spits right into the the pretty teenage face the demon is wearing, "You disgust me. You disgusted me before you were mine, and you disgusted me on my table, and you disgust me now. I want nothing from you."

"Not even," says the demon slowly, playing with her long blond hair, "if it meant you could find your precious little angel?"

Dean's determined resolve melts away into nothing, and he drops his head back on to the pillow relaxing into the mattress he hasn't even tried to move from, "Talk. What do you want?"

"To let you go, Dean. Like I said, I just want to do you a favor. I'm trying to help you out."

"What's the catch, you bastard?"

"What catch?"

"Oh, don't fuck with me. You're a demon, there's always a catch."

"You've caught me," she giggles again, "I'm a big bad demon, of course I want something out of this. But, would you hold it against me if I said I was bored?"

"Bored? What the hell do you want? My soul? I'm sorry, but no chance in hell."

"Oh, come on. This is going to be fun for me. Why on earth would I want something? This is like The Amazing Race, big boy, but instead of a million dollars, when I win I get my pet back and you'll get to be my favorite new toy, or second hand toy I guess, but whatever. How would you like to come back to the play pen boy-o?"

Dean doesn't say anything but reaches under his pillow for the knife that he can't believe he hasn't already tried for. He half believes it's because he was supposed to die here, and the rest of him believes that he wanted to. But now, death has been denied to him, the poetic justice he so deserves has been taken away, and now, there is hope, something to live for besides Sam and Bobby, something more then eat, drink, sleep. There is Cas again and he's going to look for him, he's going to find him. He's going to do everything he possibly can, and he will throw aside everything that gets in his way, because it's Cas, and he could be alive.

The demon smiles at him and as he thrusts the knife into the girl's ribcage, a black stream of smoke blinds him and the demon escapes and the girl collapses on him, wounded mortally, but that's OK, because he can get her to a hospital in time. Then Dean will find Cas and then he will find the demon that was once David Hopeson and make him pay for taking this girl from her bed and what he may have done to Cas while he was down in hell, on his table, under his care, however you want to say it; if he hurt Cas, Dean was going to hurt him. Dean could ask Cas about hell, and Cas could tell him if he wanted and Dean would try to make him feel better like Cas used to try to, 'cause Dean could find him. There was finally hope in Dean's heart. Finally it beat for something more than biology.

The demon that was once David Hopeson strolled into the room he was tortured in, all those years ago, and the room that now his. This is his favorite room. He smiles and turns to his pet, his toy, his charge, "Hello, Castiel."

Castiel looks up at him and spits.

"Now, now. That's no way to treat me. I show you such mercy and you fling saliva at me? No, no no. That is simply not how it's done."

"You showed me nothing but hatred and sin. What did you do to him?"

"Oh, I just paid him a little visit, that's all. Nothing to get your pretty little panties in a twist over."

"What did you do to him?"

The demon laughs his strange childish giggle, "Why, I gave him back his heart, dear Castiel, it's going to break and it will bring him here again. It will drag him back down to hell and it's going to be all your fault, too."

And an angel eyes leak their first tears, "Uh, uh, Angel, no tears." And a demon reaches and pulls out a wet and bloody blue eye out of it's socket and picks up an old saw, "Now, dear boy, would you like to take up the knife today?"

There's a choked sob and a "Never," and the demon's smile drops.

"Wrong answer," he says as he rests the saw on the angels throat and drags through his vocal chords.

Ok, so it's the end! This was really fantastic to write and I love the way it turned out. There is a huge portion of me going 'I wrote Kayzo a fic and she liked it!' and I'm super proud of what I've done. I hope you guys like it, and I really really think you ought to go read Hell because, honestly, this makes no sense without it. I suppose it could, if you squinted really hard, but it's better to know it all I guess!
Well, you know the drill. I would love for you to tell me what you think of this and I hope you liked it!

XO BELLA