Sam tells him everything. Of course he does. He doesn't look like he'd last long under a knife.
Sam tells him everything. He tells him about Jess, and his voice wavers, but Dean's grip doesn't loosen on the knife handle. He tells him about dying. He tells him about deals with demons, he tells him about a bitch called Bela, he tells him about hellhounds (and a phantom memory rears in Dean, makes him flinch).
He tells Dean everything. Dean cuts him up anyway.
SPN SPN SPN
'You went to Hell,' Sam grits out. Dean's dragging the blade carelessly over his collarbones, carving thin crimson lines. 'Dean, you can fight this.'
'Go on, Sam,' says Dean. 'I want to know.'
Sam's face is chalky. There's a thin sheen of sweat over his forehead. Dean gently sprinkles salt into the cuts he just made, and every tendon in Sam's neck pulls tight.
'Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck.'
His shirt is hanging off him in rags, body a blank canvas of soft white skin. He has a few moles here and there. Dean thinks they're cute, avoids them when he slices in. He hasn't made Sam scream yet, but then, he hasn't used the bleach yet.
'Go on, Sam.'
'Went to- went to Hell. Oh- oh fucking- oh, God- you were there for forty fucking years, okay? And- oh God Dean' (as Dean carves lines between each rib, slow and methodical) 'they hurt you, okay? For- for thirty years. And you became a- ngh- a torturer.'
'And you really expect me to buy this?'
'I'm telling the truth,' he says through clenched teeth.
Dean doesn't know and doesn't care. He feels so good, doing this, feels free, like a caged animal just released. He feels like surrender.
'So tell me, Sam,' he says. 'What did I do to them? All those poor souls? What did I do?'
Sam coughs, his body jolting with the effort. Blood glistens in his mouth. 'No.'
Dean cups a hand behind his ear. 'Come again?'
When Sam finishes coughing, his eyes are wet. He looks up at Dean. Damn, those eyes just about break his heart. 'Why are you doing this?'
The smallest blade. He puts it beside Sam's left eye, and Sam shies back; Dean grips his jaw in one hand, holding him still.
Sam is trembling. He can feel it.
The knife moves up, tracing a thin red line- barely even a scratch- over one cheekbone. And then it skates over the very surface of Sam's eyeball, the tip of the blade brushing, very, very gently, over the vitreous humour. The pupil. One slip could blind.
An intake of breath, so shallow. The knife slips (except it doesn't, because Dean's knife never slips, not really). Sam makes a wounded noise. His eye is unharmed; his eyelashes are cut off, lying fragiley on Dean's thumb.
Dean whistles. He pinches the eyelashes between thumb and finger, lays them carefully on the table. He crouches in front of Sam, presses the bloody tip of the knife into the vulnerable flesh beneath his chin, like the underbelly of a dragon. Sam's eyes are closed tight.
'We can stop all this, Sam,' he teases. 'Just say the magic word.'
Sam doesn't say anything. It wouldn't really matter if he had. But Dean was expecting some kind of reaction, you know? And maybe he'd've gone easier if he'd've got it.
Instead he is seized with a sudden vicious need to make Sam scream, and memories flicker dark and ugly somewhere, flashes of torn flaps of skin and muscles obscenely exposed.
Dean puts the knife to the soft skin of Sam's stomach, concave from sickness and tension. He can feel the spasming muscles of his diaphram, like broken wings, as Sam's heart rate speeds up further.
The knife isn't the sharpest. He's trying to flay away a strip of skin, but he has to saw more than slice, and it's difficult to stop himself going too deep. Sam's eyes pinch tighter, tears forcing their way out, and his hands curl into fists. Dean tenses and waits for the scream.
It never comes. Instead Sam bites hard on his lip until it bleeds.
When Dean climbs up to straddle Sam's legs, when he leans forward and suckles the blood from Sam's lips, when he forces his tongue into the bloody hollow of his mouth, Sam makes a shocked, violated sound.
Dean pulls back. 'You won't scream,' he says. 'I don't get it. The others all screamed. Why won't you scream?'
Sam's eyes fly open, and they glint with rage.
Sam is sick, exhausted, bloodied, flayed, malnourished, tortured, half-naked. It's meant to humiliate, this process; it's meant to debase and to shame. He should be hanging his head, shreiking, passing out.
Why is it, then, that in this moment Dean feels filthy and low? The message in Sam's eyes is there: Sam is a creature of fury and grace, of unimpeachable dignity. He's shaking with blood loss and probably cold but he draws himself up in his seat as far as he can, blood spilling over from numerous cuts as muscles contract. He looks at Dean and all Dean can see is rage.
Nothing that Dean can do will change the fact that, in this moment, Sam is magnificent.
And then he spits at Dean.
Sam spits at Dean. Sam spits at Dean. A gobbet of blood and phlegm that hits just below his eye and drips down, and then Sam grins at him with bloodstained teeth and this should not be possible.
'You dumb fuck,' Sam slurs out. 'You sick dumb fuck. You think you're gonna do to me anything that hasn't already been done a thousand times? I was in Hell, you fucker, for centuries I was in there, okay, and the things that were- that were done to me-'
Sam tips his head back and laughs, like it's the funniest thing ever.
'There aren't words, Dean,' he says. 'I've been turned inside-out, flayed from head to toe and burned alive, raped raw and starved for centuries and had every bone smashed to shards and felt every fucking thing. I've eaten my own fucking warm intestines.'
Dean realises that Sam is probably insane.
'So fucking bring it,' says his little brother, and his eyes are bright.
The sound Sam makes when Dean pours bleach over the flayed skin of his belly is barely human. It's a thin, agonized cry, not quite a gasp, not quite a howl.
Then Sam is sobbing, gasping, eyes glazed and hair hanging forward. His hands scrabble on the chair arms as Dean grasps one of the strips of skin hanging down from his stomach, and tugs.
It takes a whole lot more effort than you'd think to tear skin away.
Sam is retching by the time it comes away in Dean's hand, dry-heaving painfully. His fingers curl up like dying spiders with each spasm. Blood spatters the floor. The contracting muscles of his stomach are exposed, and suddenly Dean feels queasy.
God knows what possesses him to do it. Mostly it's the sudden savage urge to make Sam stop (because God that looks like it hurts when he's dry-retching like that, but that was the point, it should hurt, but Dean suddenly can't remember why, and why oh fuck why is it always Sam?).
His fist slams into Sam's stomach on its own volition, and Sam finally screams.
And-
(Sammy.)
(Oh, God, no.)
But no because that glimpse of whateverthefuck is being overtaken, overlaid by those images, home-cut mouths flapping and bloody in people's faces, breasts segmented into sunburst shapes, limbs amputated with a slow-moving chainsaw, fingernails pushed back until they pop out, hot irons applied to eyeballs until they burst like rotten berries, skin and muscle and bone being rubbed away with bloodstained sandpaper and these things were done to Dean too
Hell memories. He's got back his Hell memories. He's on the floor, carpet under his cheek (and oh God they stitched his mouth and nose and eyes closed, they ripped his jaw off and bit away his nose with blunt human teeth, he didn't have a face anymore)
On his feet. How is he standing? Feet, he usually got rid of those first; there was this one man, paunchy, hairy, and Dean stamped on them til he felt every single bone break, til his feet were messy splintered things barely attached to his legs. There's someone in front of him, handcuffed to a chair, unconscious. Oh, God, is that Sam? Did he do that? The blood is too bright to look at.
He's keening, a bright hard noise, lurching out into the night air. He closes his mouth. His throat is raw. His name is Dean Winchester. His name is Dean Winchester. The fog of memories is lifting now. God, there must be decades' worth of them here.
Somehow he's in the car. His hand is on the keys in the ignition. Muscle memory; maybe he's coded to run. Sam, what did I do to you?
He needs his life back. He needs to fill in the gaps, confirm or deny. Either Sam deserves everything he did or Sam deserves nothing he did. And the old woman was keeping the manticore in the cellar.
Halfway through the drive, he's cursing himself for leaving Sam there; he can't even really remember what he did to him, or at least not everything, but it could have been bad, Sam could be like one of those howling faces in the Pit. What if- no. He isn't going to think about that.
SPN SPN SPN
When Dean gets out of the Impala, his legs are shockingly steady and there's a gun in his hand. Focus. Focus. This is suburbia; why are the streets this empty? Is that chanting?
He follows the source of the noise. It's definitely chanting.
The villagers are in the town square. It's like a scene from a woodcut, or from Beauty and the Beast. On a wooden platform, silhouetted against the moon, is a creature. Are all the things he and Sam hunt this fantastical? The outline- it's like a lion, a massive beast, but its head looks tiny and shrunken in comparison to the rest of it.
He only realises that there's somebody tied to a post on the platform when the manticore lays into them with a sound of rending flesh, and they shreik. Dean flinches. The screaming isn't stopping. He breathes through the wave of images. It's not a massive surprise that the townspeople are sacrificing each other to the manticore; he can only wonder what it offered in return, or if it simply offered not to eat them.
(The manticore has a human head; does that make it cannibalism when it eats someone?)
Fuck it, he needs a plan.
