Dean recoiled back from Sam, feeling John's hand on his shoulder tighten. He looked to his father, horrified, and saw his eyes were as inky black as Sam's. He jerked back, his breath catching. The circle of old friends and family was closing in around him, hands gripping weapons readily, mouths twisted into vicious, satisfied grins, and every pair of eyes were identical voids of fathomless darkness.
Before Dean could lean down to find the sword, he felt something hard whack into the back of his head, dazzling him. Another half-familiar image flashed behind his eyes, one of blood and screaming and a laugh that made his skin crawl. He pitched forward and was knocked to the side by the butt of a shotgun to his jaw. Fire and lightning danced behind his eyes as long dagger-like teeth bared in a fearsome growl. A knee to his abdomen sent him thudding into the sweet-smelling grass.
His fingers found something hard and he brought the sword up in a wide arc, trying to buy himself some time, but the clang of steel on steel cut through the night and the weapon was wrenched out of his grasp before the sound had faded from his ears.
Boots and fists and biting weapons rained down on him, pummeling his unprotected back as he curled in on himself, covering his head with his arms in a vain attempt to protect it. Knives cut his shirt open, and then his skin as the air was knocked out of him again and again. Every blow seemed to carry another burning, terrifying image with it, as though they were beating a nightmare into his very flesh. Above him, he heard laughter.
He saw a thin man with pallid features look up at him in wide-eyed shock as a red stain drenched his dirty shirt. Dean tasted blood. He cried out, and the laughter increased.
A child, no more than four, trembled before him, his thin arm held protectively over a baby to his side. Dean felt the weapon shudder through the kid's terrified expression. Dean retched, blood spilling onto the grass, glistening wetly in the wan light. He tightened his hold on his head, trying to keep the images from tearing it apart. Strong hands reached down and pulled him onto his back, pinning his arms above his head, exposing his torso. Steel bit into his abdomen. Blood ran in dancing rivulets down his chest.
He saw Sam's startled expression as Dean's hand clenched around his throat, throwing him bodily across a dank room, sending him crashing into a heap amid splintered wood. He felt his knuckles crash into his brother's face, his gut, his chest, over and over. He saw blood erupt from his lips and forehead as his eyes glazed over. He heard his choked pleas, begging him to stop, and again, he heard the unearthly, inhuman laughter, could feel it bubbling up from inside him. Dean's eyes were open, but all he could see was blackness. The silhouettes of the silent trees, the impenetrable, unending night, and the uncaring voids of the eyes leering down at him from faces he loved so deeply.
The pain of ripping flesh and breaking bones was too faint to distract him from the agony in his heart. Each flash of what he knew was memory intensified the burn and he wished more than anything in his life that Bobby or Sam or Ellen or anyone would just cut it out of him. He couldn't bear it. It was too much.
As he looked from face to face, begging them with his eyes to simply end it, Dean caught a glimpse of a small figure backing into the trees. It turned and ran into the darkness. Dean tried to call out to it, to beg it to take him with it, to tell the others to kill him, but his voice was lost to the ceaseless blows that ruptured his living corpse. Dean saw another figure follow the first, this one larger, stronger, crouched low as it stalked its smaller prey. Something in Dean, something miraculously untouched by the suffocating agony that was consuming him, stirred as he watched the figures vanish into shadow. He tried once again to call out, but only thick blood left his lips.
It was hopeless. He was helpless. He was going to die.
He turned his face back towards the starless sky obscured by black-eyed faces and waited for the final blow that would shut out the paltry light of the smoke-veiled moon.