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Hell was pretty much as he’d expected it, only worse, because it’s one thing to imagine torment and quite another to actually experience it.
Azazel rarely bothered with him, except to drop by on occasion to gloat silently as his minions had their fun. He had the impression that the demon didn’t really care, that now it had John Winchester in its possession like a trophy, there were much more important things to occupy its time. He wasn’t sure how to feel about this. Finally having to concede defeat to his nemesis of twenty years; a victory, of sorts, in that he’d saved his son, but still a capitulation of his pride, his vengeance; and it all came to nothing. He was nothing, merely a plaything for lesser demons, a toy tossed to Azazel’s children, a bone to dogs.
They certainly enjoyed him though. Constantly devising new methods of torture, new ways to get under his skin and into his mind to prick him to his soul with rage, humiliation and despair. There was very little fear; fear is for the unknown, and here, he had no illusions, knew all he had to expect, had only to wonder tiredly what their next invention would be. There was simply pain, and anguish. Helpless, and alone, in the utter dark.
Their newest trick was a kind of cinema screen, shining before him where he was bound to a chair, the only point of reference in the shadows. It showed him his sons, and he had no doubt that the images were real, that somehow they were tapping into the world above and monitoring events as they occurred; no wonder it had been so easy for the Demon to track them, when he wanted.
Of course, they didn’t show him a live broadcast, second by second byplay of everything Sam and Dean did in their daily lives. This was for his torment, their entertainment. The screen played snatches, sometimes whole scenes, sometimes only the glimpse of an expression, a muttered word, tantalising in their incompleteness. He was witness to every painful moment in his boys’ lives; every set-back, every argument, every physical blow. Fight scenes reeled out lovingly in minute detail until just before the end, when the screen would go dark and he would be left wondering, heart in his mouth, if they had survived, until the next time the screen lit up to show him fresh anguish. He saw his sons as through a veil of blood, grime, sweat and tears, faces always pinched and scowling, or drawn and slack with pain and dull despair. He could have looked away, but he could not stop his ears, and they were his sons; he could not ignore them, however painful it was to watch.
He hurt for them, with them, as the things they fought sought to batter their flesh, but hardest of all to witness were the times they hurt each other. Squabbling bitterly, lashing out in anger, holding themselves apart in angry silence for mile upon mile of the endless, empty road, only to begin all over again when they stopped moving. They were like caged beasts, rubbing up against one another, forced to endure too much time in too close a space, with all the raw, pent-up emotions of their daily struggle for survival boiling in their blood like poison. He watched the clenched fists, the throbbing temples, the gritted jaws, the brooding, vicious glances, and he winced as they needled and goaded one another with insults honed to deadly precision through years of experience and intimate knowledge. He kept expecting one of them to snap, to strangle his brother and dump him by the roadside in a ditch.
It was a torment, to see them like this, never to witness the brighter moments which must surely occur, off-screen in the taunting darkness; but it was also something of a strange comfort, to see them at all, to know that despite the hardship and the pain they were alive, and still fighting the good fight. He worried constantly that Sam was sliding, driven by the harshness of his existence towards the callousness that would precede his eventual turn to evil, succumbing to the darkness that reached to claim him. He worried that he had laid too much responsibility on his older son’s shoulders, that Dean would not be able to stop Sam’s inevitable downslide, was in fact precipitating it; that he knew it all too well himself and would eventually abandon the fight, and his infuriating, impossible sibling. He worried, but each time the screen flickered to life to show him some new aspect of misery, he knew that it had not happened, not quite yet, that they were holding on, and he drew what strength he could from that fact.
Then one day (or night, or whatever period of time – there was no way of measuring it, down here in the eternal dark) they came to him with leering whispers and expressions of diabolical glee, and said they had something new to show him, the proud father, the noble warrior; what would he make of this, how now would he rate his success in raising this travesty of filial devotion?
He watched in a kind of fascinated horror, his stomach dropping as though filled with lead, throat constricting and head buzzing with bewildered disbelief, though he knew that in this one thing, the demons did not lie to him. His sons, his precious boys, of whom he’d always been proud despite their flaws and waywardness, who he’d raised to be good and righteous and honourable in their duty to him, to each other, to the world; his sons, Winchesters, and he watched, stunned and sickened, as they grappled with one another, rutting like animals, a promotional ad for carnal sin.
His boys, practising, practising incest, as though they’d abandoned all moral decency, and oh God, what would Mary think, if she could see this..?
The demons cooed and twittered, murmuring obscenities in his ears, stroking his face and hair, laughing and congratulating one another on this proof of the inherent weakness of humanity, yet one more fall from grace. He ignored them, as best he could, sitting like a statue, his face graven with grief and defeat, and the tears washing over his cheeks though he had long since closed his eyes. Eventually they left him, and soon the screen went dark and silent with the culmination of the obscene tragedy, but he sat on, weeping in the dark.
This became an all too regular, nightmarish occurrence, as his sons apparently did not think better of their actions, and the demons delighted in this new twist to his torment. In fact, whether it was that the boys indulged themselves more and more frequently, or whether the demons just decided to leave the show running because this new anguish was even greater than watching them get hurt, he began to see more and more of them coupling and less and less of them in pain, and the scenes began to lengthen, drawing out into a wider context, before and after the deed.
And something clicked in his head.
Yes, they were fucking, and it was incest, and the world frowned on the immorality of that. But they took pleasure in it, in each other, and he saw that their coupling was always most frantic after the worst days, the greatest pain, and that they drew comfort and solace from their intimacy. He watched with newly opened eyes as he realised that the sex was almost secondary to the closeness, the deep affection between them, just a by-product, a way of letting off steam. He listened with amazement as Dean murmured heartfelt words of a nature so sweet he would never have believed they could fall from his elder, cynical son’s tongue, whispered endearments against a shared pillow as he tenderly stroked Sam’s hair and held him close after their lovemaking. Sam invariably told Dean that he loved him during the exhilaration of sex, and although Dean never repeated those actual words, his behaviour spoke the truth of his emotions in a way purer and simpler than language.
John realised that his sons were actually happy, that they were drawing considerable strength and contentment from one another’s love, and that this was helping them to overcome their hardships and stave off the encroaching dark. Who knew better than he the depths of anguish to which a mortal soul could plummet? Against such knowledge, how could he resent whatever pleasure Sam and Dean could snatch from the jaws of fate? It might be immoral, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as turning into cold eyed killers, indifferent to the fates of their fellow human beings, murdering and torturing as the demons would have them – have Sam – do. It was just sex, it was hurting no one, and it seemed to him that the sin of lust was tempered by the greater virtue of love.
He felt a weight ease inside him, something tight within him loosen and expand as though suddenly he could breathe after having been suffocating in despair. His sons were together, and looking after one another, and – mostly – happy. It was all he had ever wished for. The circumstances were irrelevant, mere details, fettering principles left meaningless against the greater scope of what might have been and what might yet be.
The demons grew bored, seeking new stimuli to goad their captive, and the screen was taken away so that he no longer saw his sons, but though he missed it, he didn’t really feel its loss. He knew that Sam and Dean were okay, and he was pretty sure that if things went badly, the demons would be only too quick to thrust the grisly details in his face again. The fact they could find nothing to torment him in the lives of his sons meant only good news.
John held onto this hope, the one bright sliver of comfort in his miserable existence, clutching the ragged edges of his sanity around it to keep him safe from the demons’ plaguing. He was not at rest, far from it, but it was a precious fragment of peace, the one comfort for his tortured soul.