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It happened suddenly, excruciatingly slowly. The Hellhounds got him, he felt their sick breath and invisible teeth tearing him open until he didn’t and while his body was dying, heart slowing its frantic beats and lungs filling with blood, his soul was being rent, too.
It’s acrid.
There’s a stench of sulfur suffocating Dean before the rest of the notes hit his senses - sharp, metallic burst of spilling guts and burning everywhere. He’d vomit only there’s that smell everywhere, too, and he can’t. He’s pulled taut.
It hurts. It hurts beyond description. Hooks tear through him with all the tenderness of a warship cleaving the waves. Foreboding pressure turns to sharp prodding turns to slowslownotooslowohaaahh! tearing of flesh until he can’t breathe, can’t do anything but feel caught, hooked on more and more lines. Two synchronized crunches of bone and his wrists are skewered. Muscle and skin separate, he’s lifted high and pulled everywhere at once like that grisly medieval torture he saw in a book at Bobby's once, the figure pulled apart by four animals.
That seems like sweet kindness compared to this lingering, ongoing misery. Dean doesn’t understand how he’s still pieced together, how he’s existing at all when it’s too much, too awful for anyone to take.
He isn’t existing, of course, not really. It’s just his soul being torn. That’s no comfort when Dean feels the hooks pierce through his stomach, his ankle. Whatever charred mess remains of his soul now that it’s in Hell’s keeping is a distant problem.
Asked once he emerges Dean could tell you every scent, every sensation, every terrible gratifying moment since he picked up a knife and started carving instead of being carved. Oh, he won’t, because fuck that, but he could. This is the kind of shit to linger forever at the corners of his mind so even when he’s out, it’s just a quick left turn on memory lane before the hooks are back and he just can’t keep running. All it does is bring him back again to the same place, same nightmares all the damn time. The ones where he repeats Alistair's lessons are worse and he wakes up a sweat-soaked mess either way. Awesome.
Drinking does jack shit but John didn't raise a quitter and, besides, old habits and all that.
The more he heaves and tries to breathe the deeper that brimstone smell gets in. He can’t choose between not breathing and focusing on his body carved up piece by piece or filling his lungs with a blink of respite as he concentrates with all he has on sucking in air without jostling his wounds.
And then he notices the screams. They’re sharp panicked stabs, desperate entreaties for mercy, for anything to make it stop.
They’re begging for Sammy.
They’re his.