Save Me From Myself

Chapter Two: This Is Temporary, Hell Is Eternal

Dean took a shaky step forwards and, with trembling hands, he released the chains confining his sister before him. She didn't move at all for a moment, didn't speak, didn't even breathe. She just lay there before him in shock, unable to function, looking as though she was going to throw up. There were tears shining in her eyes, clinging to her eyelashes as she tried to hold them back, rolling down the sides of her cheeks and dropping to the cool metal of the table beneath her when she couldn't manage to—he struggled to look at her. Seeing her in such a state hurt him.

Lacey looked up at him, unable to form a coherent thought. That was her brother, standing above her, hands and shirt covered in deep red blood that she knew didn't belong to him. All the time she had been down there in the pit, all the time she had spent being tortured, she had always thought somewhere in the back of her mind that the same thing was happening to him. She had thought somewhere in the deep, bloody corners of hell that her brother was experiencing the same anguish and horror that she had been.

But she had been wrong.

She couldn't have been more wrong.

What was happening to Dean was so, so much more harrowing.

Dean had changed. Something inside him had changed. He wasn't Dean anymore, at least, not there. Where he was now, there was a darkness to him that she could never have associated with him. She couldn't see him anymore, there was a vacant look behind his eyes—eyes that had once been so full of life and shimmering with mischeif—that was gone. There was nothing left within him, as though he had just checked out and left behind an empty body.

For all she knew, he could have. Because the man she was looking up at was no longer her brother.

And Dean could see that. He could see it in her eyes, he didn't know anymore what he looked like, he couldn't remember the last time he had seen his own reflection, but he knew by the look in her eyes it couldn't be good. She appeared as though she was looking up at a stranger, and that physically hurt him.

After a moment she seemed to compose herself, and somehow found the strength to push herself into a sitting position. She took a deep breath, fighting back the rising urge in her chest to be sick, and moved so she was sitting on the edge of the table, her legs hanging over the side and her eyes fixed on the dirty, damp stone floor.

Tentatively, Dean reached out, as though he was going to place a hand to her shoulder, even if it was just to check that she was really there, but she flinched away. She didn't even realise she had done it, it was completely involuntary, and she hated herself for doing it, but it happened before either of them managed to process the movement. His hand hovered there for the briefest second, as if in shock, before his face completely dropped. Her eyes slowly rose to him, and for a second she could've sworn he was going to cry.

"Lacey..." The name slipped passed his lips, it still didn't feel right, her name being spoken somewhere like that. It wasn't right. He shook his head slowly, remorseful, and sighed. "I..."

But he stopped, because what was he supposed to say to her? How was he supposed to explain what he was doing, what he had been about to do to her? He couldn't apologise, that wouldn't cut it. There weren't enough apologies in the world to make what he had been doing alright. And he knew that. If she only knew the true extent of the pain he had inflicted upon other people, if she had known how it made him feel, how he enjoyed it... If she knew how he basked in the sounds of their screams, knowing he was doing it right... If she knew how he had laughed in their faces when they had begged him for mercy, the same way that he had once done, the same way he was sure she had done there... She would never look at him the same way again.

He was a broken man, and he knew that. He loathed himself for it. And so would she.

Lacey shook her head, as if to ask him not to try explaining. In all her life she had never seen her brother look so broken. She had never seen such a lifeless and shattered pain in his eyes. And that was enough for him, he turned away. He couldn't even face her anymore. He couldn't see that look in her eyes, he just couldn't. That wasn't the look a girl was supposed to have when she was looking up at her brother. She looked frightened, hurt, disturbed... But then there was sympathy, and sorrow, what he didn't deserve from her... He couldn't put into words the emotions in her eyes.

As he turned his back on her, she understood. She realised how damaged he had to be if he couldn't even bring himself to face her anymore. She hopped off the table and found the floor beneath her boots, taking a small step closer to him.

"Dean..." she whispered, and he stilled for a moment, tense. "Look at me."

For a second he did nothing, didn't even react. But then, he found some strength and turned to look at her, tears shining in his eyes, threatening to spill. Her heart dropped at the sight of him. Some ounce of humanity had returned to his eyes, he became a little more recognisable to her. But that only made it hurt more.

Her trembling hand reached up to him and her fingertips gently wiped away the tears from his cheek with the faintest of touches. He could see her eyes searching him, reading him like he was the most interesting thing she had ever seen before, and she shook her head.

"Wha the hell have they done to you?" she asked him, with such pain that he felt the lump in his throat grow enough to hurt.

Dean opened and closed his mouth a couple of times, he didn't have the words to answer her, because he didn't know. He shook his head, lost. "I—I'm sorry." he choked on his words, because that was enough. It was too much.

But before he could think to get anything more out, her arms wrapped around his neck and she pulled him towards her, crying softly against his shoulder. For a moment, he didn't react, he was frozen, because that—having someone there, having someone show him affection—was almost foreign to him now. He had forgotten what it was like to have someone touch him without the intention to harm him, he had forgotten what it was like to touch someone without intention to harm them. Slowly, he brought his arms up to wrap around her middle and dropped his forehead to her shoulder as he finally cracked.

As they stood there, in the middle of hell, and held onto each other for dear life, the thoughts lingered in his mind, and he couldn't silence them. Even if it had been for the smallest second, he had thought about hurting her. He had pictured himself making her scream, making her bleed. How could he even trust himself to be around her, what was she supposed to do if he cracked again? He was in hell, he had tortured, cut, ripped and sliced apart flesh. How could he risk it?

Lacey pulled back first, enough to look up at him, and found his eyes. "We're gonna get out of here, okay?" she told him, her voice now calm, steady. "We're gonna be okay."

Dean nodded, he didn't know which one of them she was trying to convince, but he knew that it wasn't true. The days in hell felt as though they went on forever, they always did, but that didn't mean they actually lasted forever. Eventually the day was going to change, and she was going to be ripped out of there, he would go back to being trapped in his own little hell, where he tortured the souls of the others down there without remorse—souls like hers. She would go back to being ripped to shreds by other demons, other broken humans whose souls had been warped by the years of unspeakable horrors down there.

It wasn't going to last forever. He knew that. She just didn't appear to have realised it yet. She had found her brother and so she thought things were okay again, but he knew better. Things weren't going to be okay. It was hell. No one escaped from hell. Ever.

So what was he really supposed to do?

She was crying for the brother she didn't know if she had lost or not, because he knew she didn't realise the true extent of the darkness inside him. But he was crying for the sister he already knew he had lost.

He was holding onto the girl he never, ever expected he would see again after that moment. Once she was gone, she was gone. Almost forty years he had been down there, hundreds and thousands of souls he had tortured, she had been the first he had known, and he suspected the last. It could be another eternity before she was placed back onto his rack, and by then he knew there was good chance she would no longer be his little sister, because he knew something inside him was changing, and it wouldn't be much longer before he was no longer her big brother.

They needed a miracle.