"It wasn't four months, you know."
"What?" Sam glanced over at him. "What wasn't?"
"My time down there."
"What do you mean it wasn't four months?" His brow furrowed. "Dean, you were gone four months. Bobby and I can both verify that."
"It was four months up here, but down there..." He shook his head. "I don't know. Time's different there, Sammy. Four months here... it's more like forty years down there."
"My God." Horror washed over Sam's face and thickened his voice as realization of what he meant dawned. "Dean, I..." His voice trailed off. "Look, man, I know you don't want to talk about what happened..."
Want to talk about what happened down there? No, he honestly didn't. There wasn't much point in avoiding the subject. Not with Alistair essentially letting the cat outta the bag.
"Sam, they sliced and carved and tore at me in ways that you..." He let the sentence hang. His brother was smart, he could figure out what ways for himself. "Let's just say that at the end of the day... night... whatever... there was nothing left of me." Nothing but bits, anyway. "Then I'd be brought back." He raised his bottle of beer but couldn't bring himself to take a drink. "And they'd start slicing and dicing all over again."
"How does Alistair figure into this?"
"Alastair..." His laugh sounded hollow even to his own ears. "He's something special, lemme tell ya. Real sick son of a bitch. Lilith knew what she was doing when she sent him to retrieve Anna."
"Why'd he say you had potential?"
The million dollar question. The one he hoped to avoid at any and all cost. Welp, guess that's shot.
"Because at the end of every day he would come over, and he'd make me an offer. To take me off the rack... if I put souls on it. If I started torturing them poor, unfortunate sons of bitches like he tortured me."
He stared at the ground, fighting the guilt and the memories, the pain and the regret, the bitterness and self-loathing.
"Every day, I told him to stick it where the sun shines. For thirty years, I told him that. But then I couldn't do it anymore, Sammy." His voice broke, making him despise himself even more than he already did. "I couldn't."
"Dean..."
"I got off that rack," he continued before Sam could try to justify what he had done. "God help me, I got right off it, and I started ripping them apart. I lost count of how many souls... of all the things that I did to them." Tears blurred his vision. He blinked them away. What he couldn't blink away was his self-loathing. "And what's worse, Sam? I did it just so he couldn't do it to me."
"Dean... you held out for thirty years. That's longer than anyone else would have."
Dad held out for a hundred.
Dean doesn't tell him that, though. He doesn't tell Sam that John Winchester spent ten months on that rack. That he endured the same torture he did. That he got made the same offer. Only, John didn't break. He didn't pick up that knife and start filleting people just to save his own ass.
And that? That was what shamed Dean most of all.
A/N: Hello, all! Hope this finds you well!
This is tagged to 4x10