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It’s quiet with Lucifer gone. Sam’s heart stops thundering in his ears and his mind stops tailspinning as soon as the flash is over. It’s just him and Dean here, just their breathing and the faint hum of electricity synonymous with the bunker.
The stinging in Sam’s palm fits right in with the pain pulsing around his body like blood. Everything hurts; everything is tired. He won’t try to stand just yet. His legs are too weak. They’ll shake and tremble like a newborn colt’s despite how he’ll try to keep the motion controlled. Instead, he brings his knees closer to his chest and rests his elbows on them. Vacantly, he stares forward, knife barely held in the curl of his fingers, only kept there by the friction of his skin against the wooden handle.
Dean shouts, throws and shatters something against a wall. Not unusual, far from surprising. Sam doesn’t bother to flinch. He’s cold, so, so cold. So empty. Why doesn’t he care more? He should. He should care like Dean and get angry, feel betrayed. But he doesn’t; he can’t. He’s too cold.
There’s a smear of blood on the floor in front of him. It’s small, which is why he didn’t notice it sooner. The blood is his own, but he feels no connection to it. It’s not his anymore, if it ever was to begin with. You’re mine, is what Lucifer said, hissed it hot and damp into his ear. It’s what he’s spent years whispering into Sam’s dreams; it’s what he wrote into Sam’s soul the moment he said yes. No use in denying it. There never was.
“—am. Sammy?”
Sam blinks, turns his head slowly towards the source of the sound. There’s Dean, hands on his hips with wide green eyes, standing tall where Sam is sat on the floor. How familiar. He’s spent lifetimes looking up at his brother, regardless of how tall he got. He can’t remember a time when he didn’t. Dean’s not dressed in his usual flannel and jeans, but an old military-style uniform. Sam’s brain is sluggish to come up with why that is.
“You good?” Dean asks. Blatant. Flippant. Doesn’t he see? Or does he not want to?
Is Sam good? Has he ever been good? He’s fine, sure, but because he has to be fine, the world needs him to be fine. Dean needs him to be fine.
So, “I’m fine,” Sam answers quietly.
He can see Dean doesn’t believe him, can feel that he doesn’t, but if they both ignore that part, then what Sam says can become the truth. Until the lie can no longer sustain itself, that is, and Sam unravels with it. But for now, it should be enough. The lie should last long enough to find and save Castiel, maybe even long enough to kill Amara.
Stiffly, carefully, Sam places his free hand—the hand not holding the knife, the hand he cut open to banish Lucifer—against the pillar behind him and uses the leverage to stabilize the slow rise to his feet. He staggers a little and doesn’t stand up straight, the pain in his gut pulling him over on himself.
Dean steps forward, one hand outstretched to grab Sam’s arm, but then freezes, ramrod still, in place, his eyes traveling down Sam’s body an inch at a time. A shiver crawls up Sam’s spine at the attention. Dean’s expression sours when he reaches the halfway point, first confused, then shocked, then an uncomfortably vulnerable horror.
Sam looks down as well, momentarily confused; then it makes sense. He didn’t forget, rather, he forgot Dean didn’t know.
His belt is undone and hangs forward uselessly, oddly reminiscent of those abandoned ghost towns in movies where the saloon’s door sways, the only motion in a gray, dead world. His jeans sit low, loose and saggy without the belt to support them, and underneath, his briefs rest askew on his hips. In two pairs of four, one set on either side of his hips, are deep, scabbed-over scratches. Lucifer must’ve raked through his skin in the rush.
At least he was kind enough to pull everything back up when he was done.
“Sammy—”
“Don’t,” Sam snaps, and surprises himself with the bite in his own voice. “It’s fine. I’m fine.”
Dean shakes his head. He won’t accept Sam’s lie this time. Too big. Too real. “No, Sam. No, you’re not. You—you can’t be. You don’t gotta lie to me, man. Not about… Not about somethin’ like this.”
Tears well in Sam’s eyes and his cheeks burn. He isn’t supposed to care. In his head, he doesn’t, but his body has never felt beholden to his wants. “What do you want me to say? He’s gone; it’s over. It’s over. Please, Dean, just let this go.”
“Let it—He—Jesus Christ.” Dean rakes a hand through his hair, mussing it. “He’s gonna pay for this. I’ll fucking kill him.”
Sam slides his pocket knife shut and tosses it onto the table ahead of him. The clatter makes him jump. He debates for a moment about pulling his pants up and doing his belt, but there’s not much of a point anymore. “No,” he says, “you won’t.”
Dean scoffs. “Why not?”
“‘Cause he’s possessing Cas. We’re not killing anybody until he’s free.”
“Screw Cas! He never should’a said yes. He knew better. He knew what could happen and he did it anyways. And now? He—you…” Dean’s anger runs headfirst into a wall of words it could never hope to say, and dies on the spot.
Sam closes his eyes, sighs. “It wasn’t anything that hasn’t been done to me before, Dean. I’m telling you, it’s fine.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Dean asks, the sound of his voice thick and taught; it’s soft, but spears through Sam’s chest like it was targeted anyways.
“It means what you think it does.” Then, bluntly, “I’m going to get a shower.”
Dean blinks. His mouth opens, then clicks shut.
Sam turns and makes no effort to hide his limp, ignoring the sharp inhale from behind him. It’s not until he’s locked himself in the shower room and slipped off his pants that he realizes why Dean made that noise.
There’s a pool of blood on the back of his jeans, and, when Sam looks down, his legs are slicked with it too.
~o0o~
His skin itches when he gets out of the shower. Expected, given how hard he’d scrubbed and how hot the water was. The air was so clogged with steam it’d been hard to breathe, sticking in his nose and choking up his lungs. The long shower had given him plenty of time to think about how massive the Men of Letters water heaters must be, then come up with the idea to search through the building schematics at a later date.
He sweeps a hand through the steam clinging to the mirror, carving a path for his face to peer through. The eyes looking back at him seem so unfamiliar, almost alien. A little too sharp, a little too cool. There are days that Sam looks at his reflection and sees someone else hiding in the shadow of his pupils, a second conscious stowed beneath his own, biding its time. Today, Sam’s eyes look strange because he knows he is alone. He knows because Lucifer never would have accepted anything less.
The process to dress is slow. If his body hurt before, that’s nothing compared to now. The heat of the water may have flushed the tension from his muscles and the filth from his skin, but it left him with no barrier to hide behind, no other avenues to focus his attention on. The bruises mottling his skin are blatant and ugly. Blackened already, they wreath around his wrists and hips where Lucifer’s hands pinned him down—where Castiel’s hands pinned him down—forced him still and broke blood vessels in the shape of his fingertips.
With time, Sam knows, the evidence will disappear. The blood on the library floor will be mopped up and his jeans thrown away. His bruises will fade, and the scabs will flake off to reveal new skin. Dean will push the memory from his mind, and they will never talk about this again. Someday, they’ll see Cas again, and Sam will try not to shy away from him or flinch when he speaks. Time will press on, eyes forever forward; Sam just has to do the same.
Sam clears his face of wet hair, unlocks the shower room door, and opens to the hall.
A faint pop, pop, pop greets him. Dean’s in the gun range then, obliterating some poor paper bastard framed between his iron sights. With every gunshot rolling through the halls follows a ghost of Dean’s anger. Each beats against Sam like a wave pounding a rockface, eroding him little by little across the distance. It might not be aimed at Sam, but he’s the only one near enough to be hit by the shrapnel. It saps Sam of energy he doesn’t have.
Sam eyes the opposite end of the hall before making a tentative retreat to his room. His first instinct was (as it is almost every night) to head to the library, hope he finds a book that is, at most and at best, tangentially related to their latest world-ending event, and bury his nose in it. There’s no need for research tonight, however. Sam knows all he ever could about angelic possession, and his knowledge of the opposition would put even God to shame in its omniscience. There’s no one Sam knows better or more completely. Not even Dean.
His room is exactly as he left it this morning. Bed loosely made, desk and nightstand piled high with leatherbounds and legal pads packed tight with notes. There’s plenty of pens scattered about, one always in reach when the need arises, even when a page to write them on is unavailable. Sleepless nights often end in a left arm decorated with half-indecipherable blocks of text and the occasional black smear where he’d used a spit-slick finger to clear space. Those mornings, Dean shakes his head and tells him how he’ll end up with ink poisoning one of these days—either that, or this elusive “or something” Dean still hasn’t named—citing his extra four years of wisdom as evidence.
9:58 burns bright from his digital alarm clock. The numbers bleed red, creeping in the shadow, threatening to swallow its surroundings. Numbness spreads through Sam, a tight ball forming beneath his sternum. Knuckles ghost his jaw, lips graze his eyebrow. Brisk ozone in the air. Sam flips the clock face down, then rips cord from socket. The display goes dead instantly, the cheap plastic casing creaking in Sam’s fist. He blows a harsh breath and rights it, brushing off the frenzied urge to destroy it.
Pointless, he reminds himself. It’s all pointless.
Sam skips sitting on the bed to lay down carefully, flat on his back and above the covers. His skin still itches, nerves frayed at the edges and sparking. He’s shaking, Sam notes, and swallows around the thick, dry lump in his throat.
His eyes refuse to stay closed; decided for themselves it’s better the black around him than the one inside. There isn’t a difference, in truth, and it feels foolish to be beholden to it, like a child who insists their parent check under the bed for a monster that hasn’t been there the past hundred nights. But Sam’s monsters are real, and the shadow Lucifer casts is long and eats what it feels it’s owed. In one quick grab, Lucifer destroyed any sense of security Sam spent years building for himself. He’d snuck into Sam’s mind and tricked him, then stolen his friend’s body and used it to violate them both in a place he’d finally grown to call home. Beyond the knowledge tucked away in those books, there’s nothing here for Sam anymore.
For a long time, either minutes or hours, perhaps days, Sam floats in the quiet, lonely abyss of his room. There’d been times in the Cage like this, where Lucifer grew bored of torture and cast him aside, abandoned him to one corner or another for decades on end. There was nothing in the furthest reaches of the Cage—not darkness, not an infinite pool of inky black, a simple, inscrutable vacuum of nothing. It was as if reality itself vanished when no archangels were there to witness it, and in time, Sam would begin disappearing with it, pieces of his soul flaking off, his thoughts leached from his mind before they could form.
More often than not, it would be Michael to find him. He’d gather what remained of Sam Winchester and mend him whole with warmth and tenderness. He’d speak to Sam about Heaven, of his brothers and sisters who shone as bright and numerous as the stars of a night sky they’d never see again. He taught Sam Enochian, split the flesh of his tongue and carved the language into his throat so it could never be forgotten. Maybe Michael had hoped God would rescue him if he treated Sam with kindness, pull him from the same terrifying pit he’d cast his brother into millennia ago, and return him to the light and glory where he believed he belonged. But God never did grant Michael his salvation, just as no one had for Lucifer.
But an eternity to wait out, it seemed, could not afford Michael with unyielding patience. He hated Sam, and a thousand eons worth of stories and wisdom and perspective would never have changed that. Tucked under the breadth of warmth-gilded wings, Michael would destroy Sam, twist and break him into something of his own design. “I’ll make you worthy,” he’d say, though worthy of what, Sam never knew.
Eventually, too soon and not soon enough, Lucifer would come for him, enraged at the theft and the marks not left by his hand. Sam was infinitesimal compared to the true form of an archangel—nothing more than a leaf put against a mountain—so when the battle began, Sam could only watch in awe as the ground shook and blood-smeared feathers fell like ash from a blank sky.
Sam laughs, a quick, harsh sound. The battle once meant to mark the beginning of the end, reduced to a petty spat over one tattered, hardly-human soul. It’s not funny, and if he told the story aloud no one would be smiling, but Sam allows himself the momentary, fleeting, heartbeat second worth of joy, before slinking back to numbness.
He wonders, almost idly, if Lucifer feels the same, if the satisfaction of his victory over Sam lasted, if it wasn’t just as one-note and hollow as Sam’s bark of laughter.
The door whines as it’s opened, a creak that’s been a part of the room longer than Sam has. An audibly hesitant knock breaks on the frame. Light cuts through the illusion of the Cage, the hall’s soft yellow cleaving a thin line across his textured ceiling. It disconcerts Sam a little, like an animal woken from a nap before they were ready. After a moment, he settles back into his head, tucked away behind his eyes, waits for the feel of air to rush through his nostrils, and breaks the dry seal stitching his lips together.
Dean slips inside unprompted, and Sam shuffles off the center of his bed absently, snuffing a pained hiss behind his teeth. Permission is antiquated when you’ve spent more time with someone than without. When you know the color of every tick and twitch of their face and hands better than your own, the doggedly honest truths they try to hide like an ugly scar, and how they meld together to form new meanings they never had when seen alone. It’s a part of what makes him and Dean so easy, and why the worst moments hurt so terribly.
The scent of mint mouthwash passes over Sam as Dean joins him, the wooden frame creaking as a second divot forms in the mattress to compliment Sam's own. In the bare light, Dean’s form is outlined, halfway between sitting and laying against Sam’s second pillow, one leg stretched nearly to the footboard while the other patiently waits, partially bent, should Dean need to leave quickly.
The bunker resettles as they lay on Sam’s bed, still, stiff, and silent.
Dean wants to say something—obvious, because he came into Sam’s room in the first place—but also because there’s a click in the back of Dean’s throat with every failed start, the words lingering heavy in the air unspoken, but heard all the same.
Sam waits patiently with nothing of his own to say. He has no idea what Dean wants from him right now, whether he’ll want to speak candidly about what happened, or give it a passing acknowledgement before relegating it to the past. Part of Sam wants to hide it away, detach himself from it so thoroughly he won’t think it happened to him at all. It’s simpler that way, for both of them. Better to look away than acknowledge the ruin at Sam’s back.
“I should’ve been here,” creaks out of Dean quietly.
Sam chews on the words, the shadowy guilt tainting them. “I’m glad you weren’t,” he says, and means it too. “You didn’t need to see that.”
“I should’ve protected you.” It’s a weak statement, a borderline illogical one, and they both know it.
Sam sighs lightly through his nose and says gently, “You couldn’t have.”
The body heat rolling off Dean in droves calms Sam, more than his voice and smell and the nervous way he’s fiddling with a loose thread on his sweatpants. It tells Sam that he’s real and he’s here, that maybe he can’t find the right words to say what he really means, but he’s trying regardless of the discomfort it puts them both in.
“Are you okay?” Dean asks, and doesn’t sound like he wants to know the answer anymore than Sam wants to say it.
Sam takes a deep breath—steady, in, then out—and decides to be honest. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
The ceiling fan creaks. It circulates only fast enough to keep the air from stagnating.
“Sammy?” Dean whispers.
Sam lets the sound float for a moment, listens to how the nickname dances in the black around them. “Hm?” he hums.
“I’m sorry.”
There’s a second where Sam doesn’t breathe. Unwarranted, tired tears well in his eyes, slick and warm as they fall off his cheek. Dean, somehow knowing, knocks his knuckles against Sam’s wrist, calluses on his palm rough and his hand heavy on the sensitive skin of his inner forearm. The tip of a finger finds a pulse tucked beneath bone in the gap of one heartbeat to another. It’s the opposite of the desperate, painful grounding he taught Sam years ago, when Lucifer only walked Sam’s mind and not on Earth. Dean’s touch is delicate, and in it, Sam finds a thumping murmur, either Dean’s or the echo of Sam’s own, maybe both.
The tears dry up as quickly as they came on, much to Sam’s relief and probably Dean’s too. Dean never removes his hand, keeping it held there as he begins to ramble about how long the leftovers have in the fridge, how they need to catch up to the newest episode of Game of Thrones, saying whatever comes to mind, talking for the both of them. His low voice rumbles in Sam’s chest the same way the Impala does as the engine revs.
Sam closes his eyes and can hear the scene as it rolls by with the mile markers. A soft hum underlying the music, the slightest bit off-key such that it makes Dean’s accompaniment stand out from the synth and tumbling riffs. The sides of Dean’s thumbs beat on the steering wheel but Baby never seems to mind. She purrs regardless of the abuse she’s sustained over the years, like she knows Dean’ll always been there to polish her coat and tune her engine. She keeps faith the same way Sam does, by relinquishing the responsibility to Dean.
Sam rests his forehead against the cool glass of his imaginary window, Dean’s voice fading into the hum of the highway and the unrecognizable song on the radio. Wind faintly whistles through the bad seal in the quarter glass window, the earthy hint of rain in the distance.
He doesn’t find sleep immediately, instead brushing along its edge until it makes the long fought decision to take him. And when it finally does, Dean is still holding his wrist, the touch a lifeline for them both.