Dean Winchester (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
hasperkynipples) wrote2009-03-06 12:37 am
hasperkynipples) wrote2009-03-06 12:37 am
[Commentary] for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lieu_murphy
[Oh, this piece. This piece exists because I am evil.
This was—hard to write. Very hard to write. Because Dean is so family-oriented. He believes that it’s all he is, and his family is the most important thing to him. Screw with his family, and you screw with a scary side of Dean that you don’t want to see.
The reason I picked Dean’s family as his trigger in Hell is I always got this sense throughout the early seasons before he made his deal, it’s that Dean seemed to be much more family oriented than his father or brother was. And that’s not to say anything against Sam and John, but Dean was family glue. Dean was the one who tried to keep in touch with Sam while he was in college, and he would try to keep John and Sam from fighting, and Dean was the go-between. When you look at it, John and Sam were all he had, and after having everything in his life taken away from him, starting with his mother, and ending with his own life, and Dean would do anything he could to hang on to both of them.
If he’d had his way, he would have rather died than have his father sacrifice himself for him, because Dean didn’t know what he was supposed to do with John gone, and it was becoming another thing he lost. He kind of believes that John would have known what to do when it came to Sam being grabbed by Azazel—and it wouldn’t end with him putting a bullet in Sam’s brain—where Dean was just flying by the seat of his pants, and that wound up getting Sam killed.
There was also the possibility where he may not have gone to Hell and actually had a peaceful afterlife, but that was a whole other story.
Anyway, Hell. Family was an easy trigger to pick, because it’s all Dean is. Now, into the actual fic.]
Hell had a way of bringing out the darker side of a person. They probably never even intended to turn the souls that they captured into demons. That was just a natural side effect of the space; the natural turn of the deprivation and rage on the human psyche. [I’m kind of curious if Kripke is ever going to get into the origins of Hell, and how it came to be the way it is. Because I really think that the Fallen, Lucifer, whoever, didn’t realize that whatever human souls they managed to claim would turn into soldiers for them. Or—if they intended for it to happen that way. But it could just be that I’m really interested in the demon end of the mythology—to a rather unhealthy degree.] And of all the demons in Hell, Alastair was the expert at how to get just what he wanted out of his new recruits. Dean felt the expert skill with every twist of the knife into his guy, every time he tore his body to shreds. He hated him for it, hated him more than Dean ever thought he could possibly hate anything, [Dean never thought he could hate something more than he already hated Azazel, but I think that was a lot of wasted hate now that Azazel was dead and all, so it was redirected to a new place. Alastair really earned the hate, though.] but Hell seemed to amplify every emotion he felt. Every fear, every ounce of pain, every iota of hate he could possible come up with was amplified times a thousand and threatened to tear his body to shreds just as effectively as anything those demons would do to him.
At first, the sole focus of his hate was Alastair. Alastair was the one who was causing him pain. He was the one who was putting him through this, inflicting the pain upon him, therefore Alastair was the one he hated. But it didn’t take long for his mind to turn that hate in another direction, slowly eating it’s way back on the people who had hurt him, the people who had made his life what it was and put him in this position.
[I feel like they really needed to ease Dean into twisting his emotions around and getting at what he really felt. Because if they jumped right to Sam or John, it would ruin the illusion, and they wouldn’t be able to break him that way. They needed to start with something they knew he hated and work their way down.]
It started off with the demon. The one who had started this whole mess for them. He saw the yellow eyes standing above him as the hot pokers were driven into his gut, and he wanted to reach out and cause him the same amount of pain. He knew that Azazel was dead. He knew that for a fact as he had pulled the trigger himself, but for some reason, he was there, right in front of him. And Dean wanted to feel the man’s neck under his fingers. He’d burn his eyes out and make him feel every iota of pain that he suffered because of that damn demon. He’d make him feel his mother’s death, his father’s pain, his brother’s death—everything that he had taken away from Dean, Dean would dish back the best he could. Rage began to eat at him, consuming him slowly until that was all he was, just anger and rage at the demon who had ruined his life, inside and out.
[Dean doesn’t think in torture. He may throw out threats that he’s going to tear someone apart, but their mostly empty. This was the first start of the change in him, and how he started to come up with details of what exactly he was going do to him, and I think he might have been scared if he had actually realized what he was thinking. Hell’s starting to eat away at him, and there’s nothing he can do about it but sit there and watch.]
After that, things started to get distinctly more personal. The yellow eyes started to form a face, one that he knew just as well as he knew his own. At first, he thought it was a flash back to when Azazel had possessed his father, but after a while the yellow eyes began to fade, and it was John standing over him, taunting him as the demons tore him apart over and over again. There was nothing but fear in the beginning, fear that he was feeling the kind of rage he was towards his father. Then the fear started crumbling away, giving away from the hate that bubbled under his skin. He hated his father for what he did to him. He hated how he made him grow up before he was ready. He hated how Sam was always his responsibility. He hated how everything was always laid on his shoulders, how he was supposed to be the one to hold the family together, and how he was always caught in the middle when he and Sam fought. He hated that John pushed Sam away from them, forced him to leave Dean alone for those years while he was at Stanford, how he never returned his phone calls, even when it was an emergency.
[John was really necessary to go after that. In “Dream a Little Dream of Me,” we already learned that Dean is very resentful of his father and what he forced him to do growing up. He thinks that John cost him a lot, and in a sense that’s very true. I can very much see Alastair taking little truths about Dean’s life and magnifying them times a thousand in order to get the kind of response he wants. After all, torture to him is pretty much like an art form after all those years. He probably tailor makes each experience.]
Then he went and sold his soul for his son, not thinking of the way it would tear Dean—ever loyal, ever faithful Dean—into a million pieces when he did. When John died, Dean lost his north star, his guiding light. If John hadn’t died, Dean wouldn’t be here. If John hadn’t sold his soul to keep his son alive, maybe Dean would have had a chance at something other than this—at some kind of blessed salvation beyond the grips of the demons and the way his soul was being torn to shreds.
[I rewatched “In my Time of Dying”—not before I wrote this, but recently, and I kept thinking about how if Dean had died in that hospital, and if he had gone with Tessa and John hadn’t made the deal—Dean would have had a much different afterlife experience. Probably not one that would have torn him to pieces as much—maybe Purgatory instead of Hell. It seems like it would be an interesting avenue to explore in fic sometime. Maybe.]
Dean hated his father. He hated the man who had deprived him of loving human contact beyond that of his baby brother. He hated the man who kept him from being a child. And eventually the begging for his father to stop the demon, to do something to save him twisted from fear to anger, and from anger to hate. Hate that reverberated off the walls as Dean screamed at the vision of his father. Screamed at him for all the pain he caused him, all the anguish he put him through, all the pressure he had on him. And when he had screamed his throat raw, through the pain, the ripping and the tearing, the face started to change again.
When he first saw who it was, the built up anger was turned on the demons, telling them to stay the hell away from his brother. Sam didn’t deserve to go to Hell. Sam deserved so much more than Dean had ever been able to give him, and any hate regarding Sam was hate for himself because he couldn’t give his brother what he wanted. He couldn’t keep Sam happy, and that was why Sam left him. Sam had wanted more—Dean couldn’t be enough. No matter how enough Sam was for him. No matter how badly Dean needed his family to stay together, Dean couldn’t be enough for his brother, and he only had himself to blame on that.
[This part of the fic was really where things started to hurt. There are two things that are made really clear about Dean from the beginning of the series—he will do anything for Sam, and he doesn’t like being alone. When I first started writing this out, and he gave me the idea that in the end it’s Sam who breaks him, I—wasn’t sure what to do with that at first, and I couldn’t quite pin down how Sam would evoke hate from Dean—because as I said, Dean never blames Sam for anything. Dean blames himself for not being able to provide. But then I started thinking about what would happen if things were twisted around so that Dean did blame Sam, and this is what I got.]
Eventually, thoughts started to turn, twist into something no longer resembling Dean blaming himself. Sam was the one who did this to him. Sam was the one who had put him in this position. Sam was the one who couldn’t save him from his deal. He had made the deal for Sam in the first place—Sam who couldn’t think to watch his own back. Sam who needed constant protection all the time. Dean had tried to warn him that Jake was coming—he’d tried to save his brother. In fact, he fought like hell most of the time to keep Sam alive, and Sam couldn’t do the simple thing like pay attention. Because his dumb, pain in the ass baby brother was always getting himself into trouble. Dean had given his life to protect Sam, over and over again, and how did Sam repay him?
He left him.
[That, to Dean, is pretty much the equivalent of a mortal sin. Rational Dean understands why Sam left Dean when he did—he just wanted to go to college. That wasn’t a crime. However Dean, after being tortured for near thirty years, when greeted with his brother’s face—the face of the person who had been his most constant companion for eighteen years, the one person that Dean would do absolutely anything for—is only going to see the fact that he was always there for whenever Sam needed him, and couldn’t even do the one thing that Dean ever asked of him: to stay.]
He left Dean alone to deal with John. He left Dean to hunt alone, travel alone—hell, he was even going to leave Dean to find John alone when he went missing. Sam never cared about Dean. Sam only started coming hunting with him again because Jess died and he wanted to find John. It was never about wanting to spend time with his brother. Dean was just the annoying pain-in-the-ass older brother who has gotten in the way of finding the demon that killed his girlfriend. Dean was just along for the ride. The convenient source of transportation.
[smart_alec494’s mun mentioned once that Dean was the logical choice to pull from the pit, because he was the only one who was hunting for the right reasons. Sam and John were doing it for revenge. Dean was actually doing it to help people. All Dean ever wanted to be was a hero because that’s all he’s ever known, and now, canonly speaking, he feels like he’s lost that, but that’s a whole other story. What Dean’s feeling right here is pretty much abandonment come full circle. Because in Dean’s mind, that’s what Sam did.]
The stooge who he counted on to keep him alive.
He fought the hate in the pit of his stomach for weeks, months. He wasn’t going to hate his brother. The thoughts were irrational, they didn’t make any sense. Sam loved his brother. Dean knew it. He knew that more than he knew anything else. But the longer he was on the meat racks, the more doubts started to seep in.
[This is Dean teetering on the edge. Sam is pretty much the nail in the coffin for him, because not only is his brother torturing him, but he hasn’t come for him either, and that is just as bad, as far as Dean is concerned. If his own brother isn’t even going to try and save him, he obviously isn’t worth saving.]
Why hadn’t Sam gotten him out already? Why was he still here? Why was he still being tortured?
The doubts slowly but surely soured, twisting his desperation and fear to hate again, and that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Dean didn’t have any kind of hope to hold on to anymore. Everything he was, everything he felt, was hate, agony and pain. He held onto his hate, held onto it with everything he could because it was the only thing that didn’t hurt. In fact, it felt good. It felt damn good.
[Hate is the thing, I think, that makes a demon more than anything else. It eats away at a person and takes away the line—if there’s a line they wouldn’t cross, they probably would in order to get rid of that thing they hate—and demons don’t care enough about lines to realize when they’re crossing one.]
So tell me, Dean, the silver voice would whisper in his ear at the end of the day, finishing the latest round on the meat racks with a bit of childish glee. Are you ready to come play with the big boys?
Usually Dean said no. Every single time, Dean told him to shove it. But Dean had nothing left to hold onto—and this time Dean said yes.
[Personally, I’m amazed that Dean held out for as long as he did. But if he did hold out for that long, there had to have been something that shattered him so completely, that he didn’t have anything to lose anymore. And for me—they had to have crushed Sam for him entirely, and completely tarnished whatever they could find that would make Dean hold on to him.]
The pain was gone. No more hooks in his shoulders, no more pain in the side. He was part of the team now. He was the one who got to pull the strings and cause the pain. And now he had an outlet for his hate. He saw the souls in front of him, and he saw his father’s or his brother’s face, and he didn’t have to hold back. They deserved everything that was coming to them. They deserved everything he had to give them. The cold metal of the meat hook was smacked into his palm and he leaned over the soul in front of him, watching them carefully for a moment, before raising the hook over his head and bringing it down, driving it in so that he could make it hurt as much as possible.
So that they could feel all the pain they caused him.
[And I won’t make this longer than it already is by going into my theories on what Alastair really wanted with Dean, or the souls that he may have known that he tortured, because that will just take even longer than this already has, but yeah—this was what me and Dean came up with for Hell. And it hurt to write, it really did.]
This was—hard to write. Very hard to write. Because Dean is so family-oriented. He believes that it’s all he is, and his family is the most important thing to him. Screw with his family, and you screw with a scary side of Dean that you don’t want to see.
The reason I picked Dean’s family as his trigger in Hell is I always got this sense throughout the early seasons before he made his deal, it’s that Dean seemed to be much more family oriented than his father or brother was. And that’s not to say anything against Sam and John, but Dean was family glue. Dean was the one who tried to keep in touch with Sam while he was in college, and he would try to keep John and Sam from fighting, and Dean was the go-between. When you look at it, John and Sam were all he had, and after having everything in his life taken away from him, starting with his mother, and ending with his own life, and Dean would do anything he could to hang on to both of them.
If he’d had his way, he would have rather died than have his father sacrifice himself for him, because Dean didn’t know what he was supposed to do with John gone, and it was becoming another thing he lost. He kind of believes that John would have known what to do when it came to Sam being grabbed by Azazel—and it wouldn’t end with him putting a bullet in Sam’s brain—where Dean was just flying by the seat of his pants, and that wound up getting Sam killed.
There was also the possibility where he may not have gone to Hell and actually had a peaceful afterlife, but that was a whole other story.
Anyway, Hell. Family was an easy trigger to pick, because it’s all Dean is. Now, into the actual fic.]
Hell had a way of bringing out the darker side of a person. They probably never even intended to turn the souls that they captured into demons. That was just a natural side effect of the space; the natural turn of the deprivation and rage on the human psyche. [I’m kind of curious if Kripke is ever going to get into the origins of Hell, and how it came to be the way it is. Because I really think that the Fallen, Lucifer, whoever, didn’t realize that whatever human souls they managed to claim would turn into soldiers for them. Or—if they intended for it to happen that way. But it could just be that I’m really interested in the demon end of the mythology—to a rather unhealthy degree.] And of all the demons in Hell, Alastair was the expert at how to get just what he wanted out of his new recruits. Dean felt the expert skill with every twist of the knife into his guy, every time he tore his body to shreds. He hated him for it, hated him more than Dean ever thought he could possibly hate anything, [Dean never thought he could hate something more than he already hated Azazel, but I think that was a lot of wasted hate now that Azazel was dead and all, so it was redirected to a new place. Alastair really earned the hate, though.] but Hell seemed to amplify every emotion he felt. Every fear, every ounce of pain, every iota of hate he could possible come up with was amplified times a thousand and threatened to tear his body to shreds just as effectively as anything those demons would do to him.
At first, the sole focus of his hate was Alastair. Alastair was the one who was causing him pain. He was the one who was putting him through this, inflicting the pain upon him, therefore Alastair was the one he hated. But it didn’t take long for his mind to turn that hate in another direction, slowly eating it’s way back on the people who had hurt him, the people who had made his life what it was and put him in this position.
[I feel like they really needed to ease Dean into twisting his emotions around and getting at what he really felt. Because if they jumped right to Sam or John, it would ruin the illusion, and they wouldn’t be able to break him that way. They needed to start with something they knew he hated and work their way down.]
It started off with the demon. The one who had started this whole mess for them. He saw the yellow eyes standing above him as the hot pokers were driven into his gut, and he wanted to reach out and cause him the same amount of pain. He knew that Azazel was dead. He knew that for a fact as he had pulled the trigger himself, but for some reason, he was there, right in front of him. And Dean wanted to feel the man’s neck under his fingers. He’d burn his eyes out and make him feel every iota of pain that he suffered because of that damn demon. He’d make him feel his mother’s death, his father’s pain, his brother’s death—everything that he had taken away from Dean, Dean would dish back the best he could. Rage began to eat at him, consuming him slowly until that was all he was, just anger and rage at the demon who had ruined his life, inside and out.
[Dean doesn’t think in torture. He may throw out threats that he’s going to tear someone apart, but their mostly empty. This was the first start of the change in him, and how he started to come up with details of what exactly he was going do to him, and I think he might have been scared if he had actually realized what he was thinking. Hell’s starting to eat away at him, and there’s nothing he can do about it but sit there and watch.]
After that, things started to get distinctly more personal. The yellow eyes started to form a face, one that he knew just as well as he knew his own. At first, he thought it was a flash back to when Azazel had possessed his father, but after a while the yellow eyes began to fade, and it was John standing over him, taunting him as the demons tore him apart over and over again. There was nothing but fear in the beginning, fear that he was feeling the kind of rage he was towards his father. Then the fear started crumbling away, giving away from the hate that bubbled under his skin. He hated his father for what he did to him. He hated how he made him grow up before he was ready. He hated how Sam was always his responsibility. He hated how everything was always laid on his shoulders, how he was supposed to be the one to hold the family together, and how he was always caught in the middle when he and Sam fought. He hated that John pushed Sam away from them, forced him to leave Dean alone for those years while he was at Stanford, how he never returned his phone calls, even when it was an emergency.
[John was really necessary to go after that. In “Dream a Little Dream of Me,” we already learned that Dean is very resentful of his father and what he forced him to do growing up. He thinks that John cost him a lot, and in a sense that’s very true. I can very much see Alastair taking little truths about Dean’s life and magnifying them times a thousand in order to get the kind of response he wants. After all, torture to him is pretty much like an art form after all those years. He probably tailor makes each experience.]
Then he went and sold his soul for his son, not thinking of the way it would tear Dean—ever loyal, ever faithful Dean—into a million pieces when he did. When John died, Dean lost his north star, his guiding light. If John hadn’t died, Dean wouldn’t be here. If John hadn’t sold his soul to keep his son alive, maybe Dean would have had a chance at something other than this—at some kind of blessed salvation beyond the grips of the demons and the way his soul was being torn to shreds.
[I rewatched “In my Time of Dying”—not before I wrote this, but recently, and I kept thinking about how if Dean had died in that hospital, and if he had gone with Tessa and John hadn’t made the deal—Dean would have had a much different afterlife experience. Probably not one that would have torn him to pieces as much—maybe Purgatory instead of Hell. It seems like it would be an interesting avenue to explore in fic sometime. Maybe.]
Dean hated his father. He hated the man who had deprived him of loving human contact beyond that of his baby brother. He hated the man who kept him from being a child. And eventually the begging for his father to stop the demon, to do something to save him twisted from fear to anger, and from anger to hate. Hate that reverberated off the walls as Dean screamed at the vision of his father. Screamed at him for all the pain he caused him, all the anguish he put him through, all the pressure he had on him. And when he had screamed his throat raw, through the pain, the ripping and the tearing, the face started to change again.
When he first saw who it was, the built up anger was turned on the demons, telling them to stay the hell away from his brother. Sam didn’t deserve to go to Hell. Sam deserved so much more than Dean had ever been able to give him, and any hate regarding Sam was hate for himself because he couldn’t give his brother what he wanted. He couldn’t keep Sam happy, and that was why Sam left him. Sam had wanted more—Dean couldn’t be enough. No matter how enough Sam was for him. No matter how badly Dean needed his family to stay together, Dean couldn’t be enough for his brother, and he only had himself to blame on that.
[This part of the fic was really where things started to hurt. There are two things that are made really clear about Dean from the beginning of the series—he will do anything for Sam, and he doesn’t like being alone. When I first started writing this out, and he gave me the idea that in the end it’s Sam who breaks him, I—wasn’t sure what to do with that at first, and I couldn’t quite pin down how Sam would evoke hate from Dean—because as I said, Dean never blames Sam for anything. Dean blames himself for not being able to provide. But then I started thinking about what would happen if things were twisted around so that Dean did blame Sam, and this is what I got.]
Eventually, thoughts started to turn, twist into something no longer resembling Dean blaming himself. Sam was the one who did this to him. Sam was the one who had put him in this position. Sam was the one who couldn’t save him from his deal. He had made the deal for Sam in the first place—Sam who couldn’t think to watch his own back. Sam who needed constant protection all the time. Dean had tried to warn him that Jake was coming—he’d tried to save his brother. In fact, he fought like hell most of the time to keep Sam alive, and Sam couldn’t do the simple thing like pay attention. Because his dumb, pain in the ass baby brother was always getting himself into trouble. Dean had given his life to protect Sam, over and over again, and how did Sam repay him?
He left him.
[That, to Dean, is pretty much the equivalent of a mortal sin. Rational Dean understands why Sam left Dean when he did—he just wanted to go to college. That wasn’t a crime. However Dean, after being tortured for near thirty years, when greeted with his brother’s face—the face of the person who had been his most constant companion for eighteen years, the one person that Dean would do absolutely anything for—is only going to see the fact that he was always there for whenever Sam needed him, and couldn’t even do the one thing that Dean ever asked of him: to stay.]
He left Dean alone to deal with John. He left Dean to hunt alone, travel alone—hell, he was even going to leave Dean to find John alone when he went missing. Sam never cared about Dean. Sam only started coming hunting with him again because Jess died and he wanted to find John. It was never about wanting to spend time with his brother. Dean was just the annoying pain-in-the-ass older brother who has gotten in the way of finding the demon that killed his girlfriend. Dean was just along for the ride. The convenient source of transportation.
[
smart_alec494’s mun mentioned once that Dean was the logical choice to pull from the pit, because he was the only one who was hunting for the right reasons. Sam and John were doing it for revenge. Dean was actually doing it to help people. All Dean ever wanted to be was a hero because that’s all he’s ever known, and now, canonly speaking, he feels like he’s lost that, but that’s a whole other story. What Dean’s feeling right here is pretty much abandonment come full circle. Because in Dean’s mind, that’s what Sam did.]The stooge who he counted on to keep him alive.
He fought the hate in the pit of his stomach for weeks, months. He wasn’t going to hate his brother. The thoughts were irrational, they didn’t make any sense. Sam loved his brother. Dean knew it. He knew that more than he knew anything else. But the longer he was on the meat racks, the more doubts started to seep in.
[This is Dean teetering on the edge. Sam is pretty much the nail in the coffin for him, because not only is his brother torturing him, but he hasn’t come for him either, and that is just as bad, as far as Dean is concerned. If his own brother isn’t even going to try and save him, he obviously isn’t worth saving.]
Why hadn’t Sam gotten him out already? Why was he still here? Why was he still being tortured?
The doubts slowly but surely soured, twisting his desperation and fear to hate again, and that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Dean didn’t have any kind of hope to hold on to anymore. Everything he was, everything he felt, was hate, agony and pain. He held onto his hate, held onto it with everything he could because it was the only thing that didn’t hurt. In fact, it felt good. It felt damn good.
[Hate is the thing, I think, that makes a demon more than anything else. It eats away at a person and takes away the line—if there’s a line they wouldn’t cross, they probably would in order to get rid of that thing they hate—and demons don’t care enough about lines to realize when they’re crossing one.]
So tell me, Dean, the silver voice would whisper in his ear at the end of the day, finishing the latest round on the meat racks with a bit of childish glee. Are you ready to come play with the big boys?
Usually Dean said no. Every single time, Dean told him to shove it. But Dean had nothing left to hold onto—and this time Dean said yes.
[Personally, I’m amazed that Dean held out for as long as he did. But if he did hold out for that long, there had to have been something that shattered him so completely, that he didn’t have anything to lose anymore. And for me—they had to have crushed Sam for him entirely, and completely tarnished whatever they could find that would make Dean hold on to him.]
The pain was gone. No more hooks in his shoulders, no more pain in the side. He was part of the team now. He was the one who got to pull the strings and cause the pain. And now he had an outlet for his hate. He saw the souls in front of him, and he saw his father’s or his brother’s face, and he didn’t have to hold back. They deserved everything that was coming to them. They deserved everything he had to give them. The cold metal of the meat hook was smacked into his palm and he leaned over the soul in front of him, watching them carefully for a moment, before raising the hook over his head and bringing it down, driving it in so that he could make it hurt as much as possible.
So that they could feel all the pain they caused him.
[And I won’t make this longer than it already is by going into my theories on what Alastair really wanted with Dean, or the souls that he may have known that he tortured, because that will just take even longer than this already has, but yeah—this was what me and Dean came up with for Hell. And it hurt to write, it really did.]