A lot can happen in 30 years. A lot of torture, beatings, flayings. Dean's been strangled to death a thousand times, torn limb from limb, disembowelled.

He can't pick the worst of it. Not really. Being skinned alive isn't fun, he knows that. That happened a lot. It's what finally tipped him over the edge into taking up the blade himself.

Sometimes, there were no knives involved. No torture, no cutting, nothing that would kill a man if he hadn't already been dead.

No. Sometimes, when Dean was brought to Alistair, there was no tray of tools, no stainless steel table that funnelled the blood discreetly to the floor.

Sometimes, there was a different kind of table. Heavy, solid wood. Dean was stripped naked and bent in half, face down over it. His wrists were bound and fastened beneath, his thighs spread wide apart and his ankles strapped to the table legs.

The wood was rough-hewn. Splinters pierced Dean's skin, squirmed beneath it, and festered for days after.

The first time, it didn't even occur to Dean what might be about to happen. He figured he'd be whipped, strips of flesh peeled off of him until he was nothing but ground beef and bone. He braced himself for the crack of the whip and the burn across his back like a lightning strike that never came, and so the scream he expelled when Alistair forced his cock into Dean's exposed asshole was as much surprise as it was pain.

For the first time, Dean came down off of one of Alistair's tables in one piece, but still barely able to walk.

It was better once he knew what was coming. It became something he would easily have chosen rather than being skinned alive or whipped into soup or drawn and quartered.

It was what flashed through Dean's mind when, topside, Alistair leaned close and reminded him of their 'close relationship'.

Dean liked it best once Alistair stopped strapping him down. When he could grip the edge of the table under his own steam, when he could turn over and pull his knees into his chest and get fucked so deep he could feel it in his throat.

He liked it best when Alistair let him stroke himself to orgasm while Alistair was fucking him.

And it became something he needed, down there, and it became something he begged for, down there, and it inched him ever closer to the moment he would take up the blade and turn it on the damned souls that had been his peers in hell but would soon become his victims.

Alistair taught Dean well, and Dean was an exemplary student. He followed Alistair's example as he cut, and sliced, and burned, and raped his way through souls until the moment he was yanked out of hell by an angel.

And he can tell Sam that he tortured souls, down there. But he can't ever tell him the rest of it.

fin