#alittlebit-different

[As time went on, Dean realized that he liked fewer and fewer things in the world. Angels were jerks, so were most other hunters. Psychics could kiss his ass, and he didn't even want to get started on his own personal fanboys - the guys who thought his life was a book.

Those might be the worst part of it all, actually. And those could be tracked back directly to Chuck Shurley, prophet of the lord.

Now that he thought about it, he didn't like prophets all that much, either. They were always getting in some sort of trouble. Demons and angels alike wanted a piece of them, which meant over the years, Dean had had to save more than one. They were either totally demented, or completely full of themselves. Chuck had been a pretty happy medium.

But this girl? She was new. Dean didn't really like new, either, but he was here anyway, intent on helping any way he could. Word around the hunters was that this girl, Elizabeth, had been dragged to hell by friggin' Zoltan, and had come back top-side as a prophet. A little crazy, but Dean dealt with crazy for a living. And demons were here. They'd been stalking her for a while, and now they were trying to kidnap her. He had a feeling it had to do with a certain demonic uprising.

That was why he was here, knocking on a stranger's door with an oddly resolute look on his face.]

Physical torture wasn't the worst thing about Hell. Dean had never broken down from pain, despite how skilled Alastair was at making him scream until his voice was gone. It wasn't the physical torture that made him snap and give in to Alastair's offer, it was the mental torture that did it. Sam's screams imitated, the voice of his mother telling him he was a failure, his father laughing at him...it all contributed to Dean Winchester taking the step to getting off the rack and accepting Alastair's tutorship for torture. And when finally, Dean was released into Hell to put people on the rack himself, he was a skilled torturer. Perhaps even more so than his mentor, with an iron will and a deep-rooted self-loathing to thrive on.

He didn't connect with his victims, and more often than not, he didn't even look them in the eye, but when this girl was placed on his rack, his iron mask broke down for the shortest of moments. She looked so innocent, so untainted, that he truthfully wondered what she'd done to deserve this. But as all puppets in Hell, the puppeteer was watching, yanked his chain and forced him to keep doing his job. And so he did.