Chapter Text
The hounds of hell bray ceaselessly.
Through the dirge of wounded cries, they make themselves known.
On hands and knees, Dean knows them.
They have no names, but now, with eyes blackened, he can see them. Creatures patched together, carrion, made of the nightmares and fears of the living which they drag down here, made of the suffering of the creatures they rend apart endlessly.
Dean swears that they smell of rotting flesh. Sulphur clogs his nose, but he swears, the ragged scraps of meat that hang off their bones, festering, it must be putrid.
Creatures from the pit. Spawned long ago, he doesn’t really know where they go when they die or if any more will take their place. If they breed.
She tells him, that these creatures will teach him who he is.
On hands and knees he learns.
Disemboweled, his body strung across charred ground that hisses for every drop of blood, when he doesn’t even know if his hands and knees connect to one another, he learns. Weakness. Vulnerability. There’s more to him than his vessel, for how could he suffer when he’s just a scraps, chew toys for the hounds.
On hands and knees he learns.
With vicious teeth, claws that gnarl his hands and he’s grateful for them wherever they came from, he fights. Again and again. But every time he comes back, it’s a little harder to take him apart. Plaything, thighs spread, face pressed to the burning floor till it fuses, smell of searing skin as he screams, he discovers what it really means to rip his own nose off in spite - so that he might twist around and lash at the creature mounting him.
On hands and knees he learns.
She is fond of him. Hair like a crown of flames around her head, tangled mess of horns grown from her brow curling into and away from themselves, fractal, infinite in possibility here. He learns her name whispered across the scattered ash of atmosphere that carries every scream and plea of the damned, every secret, every truth.
Abaddon.
She would make him into something new.
He kicks the hounds away and stands on his own two feet, scales for skin and the paws of a beast, eyes sharp to see the layers of this hellscape, nose to smell the shifting winds and tongue to taste the sulphur on ash.
There is nothing new about him.
He is sharpened, focused.
They flinch from him on instinct. There is power, now, in the command of his voice pulled from bellows deep, in the sway of his hands hardened against the bloodied stone.
She smiles.
He can see the tendrils of thick corrosive smoke that wend around her head, can see the pulse of rotten hearts and eyes honed bright as the hounds sit at her feet. He has a purpose here, he has a master.
And he smiles.
The hounds of hell bray ceaselessly.