In Hell, time is fluid. It ebbs. It flows. Seconds slide past each other like molecules. They come together to form minutes, hours, years, expanding and contracting, breaking apart and reconfiguring, over and over again, until eventually, time ceases to exist at all.

*

Dean Winchester. Welcome. I’m so pleased to finally meet you.

To Dean, the body attached to the voice looks like nothing and no one, just another in a sea of faceless evil, a bringer of pain and misery.

Lilith sends her regards. She’s sorry she couldn’t make it.

Dean meets his eyes, black and bottomless, and reminds himself he’s still human. Even here. Even now.

The demon’s name is Alastair.

*

Alastair peels a strip from Dean’s chest and smiles at the scream.

Does that hurt?

Dean glares at him through a rosy haze of pain and tells himself it isn’t real. This isn’t his body. His body’s topside, ash by now, and how’s that for irony?

Tell me, Dean. Was this what you bargained for when you sold your soul for Sam?

Sam. Sam.

*

Alastair’s an artist, carving patterns into Dean’s flesh until it’s gone.

It doesn’t hurt, Dean tells himself. Without pain, there can’t be pleasure.

One man’s pain is another man’s pleasure, Dean. Have I taught you nothing?

*

Alastair studies him with the cool detachment of a sniper.

You’re not special, Dean Winchester. Beneath your skin, you’re just like everyone else. See?

Dean screams and tastes blood, but it’s a false flavor. He only tastes it because he thinks he should. He doesn’t yet know how pain is supposed to taste here.

*

In Hell, the will is strong, but the flesh…well, there is no flesh. Not really. Bone and muscle, skin and blood: Like time, they don’t exist. But that doesn’t stop the pain. Oh, no. Because, in the end, it’s only the perception of flesh that matters.

*

Dean hears them clamoring for him—all the ones he sent back, all the ones he damned. Their voices add a base note to the thunder echoing inside his head.

Alastair invites them to watch him work.

Sometimes, he even lets them feed on the scraps.

*

Sam’s name is whispered everywhere—a promise to some, a curse to others.

Alastair uses it as a weapon, wielding it with the precision of a scalpel blade.

On Judgment Day, Sam will bleed, and this will all have been for nothing.

Not for nothing, Dean thinks. Never for nothing.

When he closes his eyes, Sam’s a baby, born of blood and fire.

*

Dean resists because it’s all he’s got, because if he doesn’t, he’ll stop being human.

The pain, he tells himself over and over again, isn’t real.

Alastair wants to break him, to make him beg for a mercy that doesn’t exist.

But all Dean gives him are screams.

*

In Hell, awareness is heightened but perception is skewed. Pain is exquisite, almost beautiful. In the absence of peace, pain becomes peace. It becomes everything and the only thing.

*

Deeper this time, glistening ropes of viscera drawn slowly into the light.

Tarnished soul, branded for eternity. The pain, Dean finally admits, is real.

Alastair picks through Dean’s intestines like an augur seeking omens. If you had it to do over, would you?

Yes.