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They roll around on the ground, tearing into each other, anywhere they can reach, as if blinded by a tremendous rage. Over the sound of his beating heart in his ears, the roar of the rush of blood, all Sam can hear is his own cries and Lucifer’s wordless, snapping rage. There is nothing else.
Sam spends his first minutes in the Cage only vaguely aware of the cool ground below him, the bars winding up above him. He accepts almost immediately that the Cage is a cage. Cages are nothing new to him. Cages could be motel rooms, could be a car with his brother and his father and then just his brother. A cage can be a demon that tells him he’s doing the right thing. So, he knows a thing or two about cages. This is no different. It’s only hours, minutes, or days later that he realises. This is the Cage.
He lies beaten and bloody on his back, exhausted. His chest cavity open, ribs broken and exposed, his heart laying innocently beside him. He turns his head and looks at it, it’s as though it was placed there lovingly and carefully.
A shadow obscures his vision. He squints up into the cold blue eyes of a bloody Lucifer, nose broken and bleeding sluggishly and a split lip to match, mouth twisted.
“Pathetic, foul creature,” Lucifer spits out, “Vile, disgusting-”
Sam just looks at him and laughs and laughs and laughs. He chokes on blood, and it spills out of his mouth and down his neck. Glee must still be plain to see on his face because Lucifer snarls with anger, and Sam shivers, but still he turns his head away and looks at his heart.
“What have you done to us?”
Sam can hear the heartache in every word. He forces himself up, turning to grasp his heart, but Lucifer grabs it first, and lifts it up and away. He feels a foot pushing him back into the ground, and he spits out even more blood. Where can the blood possibly be coming from? His heart is in Lucifer’s hand. Sam closes his eyes.
“How could you, Sam?” Lucifer demands.
He opens his eyes and looks at Lucifer. He’s openly weeping, his hand loosely curled around Sam’s heart. Lucifer falls to his knees over him, and this close Sam can see how much sorrow is in those eyes. He can see how his shoulders shake as he lifts Sam’s heart to his mouth and takes a bite.
Sam laughs, and chokes, and coughs up more blood. He closes his eyes, and then nothing.
But only for a minute.
He blinks his eyes, and the only way he knows he was gone is that his chest is whole and Lucifer is standing nearby, turned away from him. He sits up and runs a hand slowly over his chest, worried for a moment he would be left with nothing, but he can feel his heart beat steadily under his hand. He turns towards Lucifer.
“Did you put it back?” he asks.
Lucifer turns his head slightly.
“Yes,” he says, “but it’s missing a piece.”
Lucifer’s lips curl into a smile, and his mouth is smeared lightly with blood.
-
Once Sam is able to stand, he walks.
He tries mapping the walls of bars, but it loops consistently. At first he’s just trying to get away from Lucifer, but when Lucifer fades from his view, he walks just to walk. He’s looking for something to change, and when he reaches for the bars they’re ice cold. They burn his fingers until they’re black, and they fall off, and he passes out. Once he wakes, his body is as it was before.
He isn’t sure how long he keeps walking. He’s not hungry, he’s not thirsty, and he doesn’t get tired. When he looks up, he can see stars. Bright and beautiful, far beyond the Cage. They’re clearer here than any point on Earth, and Sam finds himself trying to find constellations - but there is none. The stars are different, or maybe he’s forgetting. He doesn’t know how long he’s been here.
He walks and stares at the sky; he doesn't even realise he’s come upon Lucifer again until he sees him in the distance. Lucifer is just standing there, staring at the nothingness beyond the Cage.
“Where is this place? Is it like a pocket dimension?” Sam asks him, but Lucifer just ignores him.
Sam sighs, and keeps walking.
When he comes back around, Lucifer spots him and lunges at him with a biting rage.
He’s almost grateful. There’s nothing else here, only them and their anger. He and Lucifer snap each other’s bones, making each other bleed. Sam gives as good as he gets, biting at anything he can reach. He breaks Lucifer’s nose again, and the blood runs freely between them. Lucifer wraps his hand around his neck, and squeezes. He’s not aware of much, after that.
He wakes up on his back, lying side by side with Lucifer. Their hands, knuckles bruised and caked with blood, are almost touching.
Lucifer looks over at him, and sees he’s back. Smiles softly at him.
“There is only this,” he whispers to Sam, “forever.”
-
Sam walks another circle.
He’s not sure how much time passes. It’s pointless to even try measuring time in the Cage, everything is infinite and nothing at the same time. Sam walks because it’s in his nature to keep going, to move forward without any real hope. Whatever Lucifer is doing, it’s happening quietly inside him.
“Where is Michael? And Adam?” he asks, lying face down in a pool of his own blood.
“Somewhere,” Lucifer says.
“Where?”
“Do you think I’m going to answer you?” Lucifer snaps. “Do you think I’m just going to sit here and answer all of your little questions?”
“What else do you have to do?” Sam says.
“I could take you apart limb from limb. I could remove your intestines and see how long they are. I could find out what really makes you tick.”
“Soon enough you’ll get bored of me.”
“I’ll never get bored of tearing into you, Sam.”
“And when you eventually do? What’ll happen then?”
“I suppose I shall try to be kind to you.”
-
They fight, they bleed, and Sam walks. Lucifer stares beyond the bars.
It must be over a hundred years before they have a proper conversation. Sam sits beside Lucifer, in his spot staring out into oblivion.
“Talk to me,” Sam pleads, “Please.”
He knows how weak he sounds.
“What can I say that I haven’t already said to you?” Lucifer sounds exhausted, “You never listened.”
Sam doesn’t have the energy to argue anymore. He looks up at Lucifer, who looks impossibly sad.
“Anything,” he says, “I’ll listen now.”
Lucifer sits down beside him. After a while, he says, “Tell me about you, Sam.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Everything.”
Sam smiles, and says, “Okay.”
They talk after that, more or less.
Sam rambles on and on, about Dean, about his Dad and Bobby and Jess and Ruby. He talks about the hunts they went on, about the places they saw in between. He talks about how he saw the largest ball of twine three times, and he recounts the plots of movies and books and tv shows.
Lucifer doesn’t talk as much as Sam does, at first. Uninterested, maybe, or unwilling. The Cage destroys his reluctance eventually, and Lucifer talks of impossible things. He talks about terraforming the Earth, of creating galaxies with Michael and Raphael and Gabriel, and which protozoa is his favourite. He talks about teaching Gabriel to prank, teaching Raphael to fly. He speaks of Heaven only once. He says, “It was perfect, eternal. But not like this. Never like this.”
It wouldn’t be, Sam thinks. But he’ll never know any different. They’re going to be here forever.
It’s inevitable that Lucifer would get angry again, but he’s not angry at him this time.
“I was beautiful, once,” Lucifer says with contempt, lying on the ground, “I was the brightest of them all, the Morningstar, and look at me now. I was perfect! I was brilliant! I was His favourite! And now - now I am nothing.”
Sam once had Lucifer inside him, curled around the base of his spine. He knows, intimately, how angry Lucifer is, how frightening. He remembers falling, falling for what felt like years with Lucifer in his skin, his mind. He remembers how his ribs itched with Lucifer’s irritation, how his anger made his skin crawl. Lucifer will never be nothing, not to him. Never to him. He lies down next to Lucifer.
“I think you’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” he says.
For an instant, the tip of his fingers touched Lucifer’s. The touch crackled in his eyes.
“Thank you, Sam.”
And that was how Lucifer remained in his mind, for the next century. Caught in a moment where he didn’t mock.
-
There is a long silence that goes on for what feels like days. Neither of them move. Where would they go? There is nothing.
“Do you think,” Sam says slowly, “That humans were only created because God wanted to be surprised?”
“How blasphemous you are,” Lucifer smiles, a light tup on his lip, “I forgot how you were made for me.”
Sam glances at him, and Lucifer’s eyes are glowing bright in the dark.
“How d’you know I was made for you?” he asks, “Maybe you were made for me.”
“I wouldn’t count on it,” Lucifer says, and laughs.
Sam isn’t so sure. There is something that stretches between him and Lucifer, chaining them together. Something a little like fate, possibly destiny. Free will was never a factor in Sam’s life.
“Will you remember me?” Sam asks one day.
“How could I ever forget?”
“What about in a week? A year? A century?”
“Sam, I could never forget about you, for all eternity. That’s how long we’ll be here. There is only this, forever.”
A long silence stretches between them.
“Promise?” Sam asks.
“I promise,” Lucifer says.
-
“Are you ready to be kind to me?” Sam murmurs.
Lucifer hums.
“Are you ready to be kind to me?” Lucifer asks in return.
Sam hesitates.
“What happens when we get bored again?”
Lucifer reaches a hand out and pulls him close by his shirt. Sam looks at him, hazel meeting blue, and he lets out a soft breath. Lucifer’s fingers trail down Sam’s cheek, Antarctic cold, and it brings out a shudder from deep in his chest.
This is the closest they’ve been since the electrifying touch of fingers what feels like millennia ago.
“Then I’ll eat your heart,” he whispers.
Sam exhales shakily, and lightly presses his lips against Lucifer’s.
“Only if I get to eat yours too.”
Lucifer smiles.