Archive of Our Own

It was a surprise when the world didn’t end, like a big prank on the cosmos. They thought the end was literally nigh and that billions of lives were hanging in the balance, but in the end, it didn’t happen like that. It was a little rug yanked out from under their feet, not a levee that burst. It was a whimper and nothing even close in pitch to a bang. The angels had called it Armageddon and the Winchesters believed them because everything said it was true, but the next day, the sun still rose in the sky and wandered there for twelve hours before giving up its dominion to the moon. There were places and cultures in remote and not-so remote locations all over the planet that didn’t even know the world had almost ended.

Somewhere out there, God had to be laughing his ass off.

Neither of them thought they would say yes, but in the end they both did. It didn’t even take that much to convince them, though Lucifer figured it out first. The one thing that would turn them both, the only thing that would change their minds, was each other. Some said later it was only to be expected that Lucifer would figure it out, he was after all the father of lies and the ultimate master of manipulation. At first, Dean even agreed with that. Lucifer was an evil motherfucker and convincing Sam to yield himself up had just been more proof of that. It was evidence of just how good at it he was, how golden sweet his tongue could be and how much of a wretched, inhuman monster he really was.

That all made sense in the beginning, but Dean didn’t think that anymore. What was that thing people were so fond of saying about hindsight? Dean was willing to bet most of those people had never spent an afternoon shooting the shit with Satan, but they still had a very good point. Lucifer understood humanity in a way that no other angel did. Possibly more than any other angel could. He had given the light of awareness to them and without it, there would not be love. There would not be a lot of things, but most importantly, without that apple, there would not have been love.

It had been love—specifically Sam’s love for Dean—that had been their downfall. As it was prophesied, apparently because Dean later found the typed chapters on Chuck’s computer. Through elaborate illusion, Lucifer would convince Sam that Dean was in danger, possibly dying, in the hands of angels. The only way to save him was to say yes and let Lucifer have him. And that was precisely what happened because everyone—even the angels who did not understand love at all—knew that they were each others’ strongest weakness.

Dean had wept over those typed pages, then burned them like that would make it untrue. He spent a long time after that hating Lucifer. He thought he’d felt hate before that, but he’d been so wrong and there was nothing he could do because Lucifer was in Sam. Sam was Lucifer.

Even hating him, Dean couldn’t kill him and when he said yes to Michael on the angel’s oath that they would find another way, Michael had agreed much more readily than he’d expected. Michael didn’t want to kill Lucifer either. He wouldn’t call it love, but it didn’t matter what he called it, Dean knew. Unlike Lucifer, Michael didn’t understand it, but Dean did and Dean loved enough for them both, no matter what name they gave it.

When it was over, Armageddon hadn’t left the world in ruins, more like ten city blocks. Most of the inhabitants would never know or believe that they had all come that close to blinking out of existence. It made Dean wonder how many times throughout the world’s history it had almost been destroyed and the thwarted catastrophe had been passed off as a level 5.5 earthquake in New Zealand or Poland or some other place he’d never been to.

The fact that the world didn’t explode and die didn’t really comfort him much though. He still had nightmares, sometimes about those earthquakes that might possibly be the earth shifting off its axis, sometimes about being ridden around like a puppet by Michael, sometimes about falling or flying or dying or the sky going black without a single star to light the darkness, and sometimes he dreamed about Sam.

On cool nights in the summer, Dean would leave the window open over his bed and dream of Sam wrapped up in the sheets with him. Sam’s skin was hot where the breeze slid along his body, making the fine hairs along his arms stand up even as Dean broke into a cold sweat. Sam kissed him all over and Dean would wake, shaking and aroused, wet with sweat and hopeless with grief as the cicadas whirred their strange song to the morning.

In the winter when it got cold enough that a pile of blankets so deep and heavy he could barely move them still would not warm him, Dean sometimes dreamed of Sam leaning over him with blazing eyes. Sam had blood in his mouth that was not his own and the way he laughed was like the crack of a bullwhip. When he moved, he moved with a grace that bespoke of bones and muscles not present in the human body, but when he touched Dean, Dean still moved toward him. He still reached for him, no matter how strange he tasted. He woke from these dreams tangled up in his bed like he was drowning; a scream caught in his throat and no idea if that was the first one or just the last of many.

Sometimes he dreamed that he was dying and even when he woke up from those, he wasn’t always sure it wasn’t true. Other times he dreamed that Sam was dying or had already died, spread out in a bed of roses with his blood seeping between the petals. Those were the dreams that people talked about because those were the dreams that had him picking up the phone in the sacred hours of the morning to make sure. Even though he knew the devil would never let his brother go or let him die, Dean had to be sure because even the devil couldn’t control everything. No one knew that better than Dean.

Sometimes those dreams of dying weren’t so bad, though. Not when it was him on top of a great divided precipice, looking down into a black, sucking oblivion that he could sink into and sleep. Those were falling dreams, too, sometimes, but almost never nightmares.

He always smelled the roses before he died, Lucifer’s roses and he held the secret wish in his heart that when he finally was allowed to lay down and die, at least that part would still be true. When that would happen or if it would happen, was anyone’s guess. Nearly fifty years later, it hadn’t happened. Dean had a few grey hairs, but they were the same grey hairs he’d had when he said yes to Michael.

Lucifer liked to say that Michael’s grace had contaminated him.

Dean had stopped arguing the point a long time ago.

Dean made the rose garden where Lucifer lived to his specifications. When he saved him from the execution that so many had planned for the devil in the aftermath, he did it with the promise that Lucifer would be imprisoned, that they would be safe and he would never be free again. The rose garden was his prison, but it was also his home and Dean had built his life, both literally and figuratively, upon it.

“You can’t keep me here forever,” Lucifer said to him often.

“Sure I can,” Dean said.

“Boy, you have no idea how long forever can be,” Lucifer said.

Dean smiled a little and shrugged. “I think I’m probably going to find out.”

They so easily could have gone on as enemies, it would have been quite natural and at first they were. Dean hated the devil with all the passion he usually devoted to inhuman creatures. He hated him more because he had Sam at his mercy and Sam’s body was his captive. It was a very fucked up and utterly hopeless hostage situation. So perhaps the camaraderie that developed between them would be properly termed Stockholm Syndrome because in a way, Dean was as much a prisoner of the devil as his brother. He was caught by him; unable to kill him for his brother’s sake and for the sake of all else, he could not let him go.

When he was feeling particularly vindictive, Lucifer referred to the rose garden as Sam’s tomb.

“You haven’t won, you know,” Lucifer told him once. “You think this cage of yours can hold me? God thought that once if you’ll recall. Do you think you’ll be more successful than God?”

“Maybe,” Dean had said.

Lucifer laughed, throwing his head back with it, the sound full and beautiful and deeply amused. “You humans,” he said, his voice hissing through his laughter. “Such arrogance. I marvel at you, how incredibly like him you are.”

“Who?” Dean asked.

“God, of course,” Lucifer said and began laughing again.

Dean took to visiting him daily, not even sure why he was drawn to him. He noticed that after the war, people didn’t know what to say to him or how to act around him. He made them uncomfortable. Eventually they stopped visiting him completely; even Bobby and it became more and more difficult to find a groundskeeper for the garden. Dean had the building expanded, rooms built with the glassed-in garden at its center and moved into them.

He told himself that someone had to do it. He told himself that he would be closer to Sam. He told himself that it was better like that, that he could watch Lucifer and keep an eye on him much better than if he lived across the city.

He told himself a lot of things, but what it came down to was that Lucifer understood him, Lucifer wasn’t afraid of him and they were more alike than Dean liked to admit. No one else in all the world could understand Dean like the devil could and it was safe to bet that there was no one else in the living world that would come close to understanding Lucifer the way Dean understood him. He didn’t want to understand him because it made it impossible to hate him, but he did.

In the winter, Dean woke from another nightmare, tangled up and sweating under thick layers of blankets and walked down to the garden gates. They were high, nearly twice as tall as he was, and thick smoked glass with the symbols of the spell used to hold Lucifer inside cut into them. He leaned his head against the cool glass, took a deep breath, then pulled the doors open and stepped inside.

In many ways it looked like he remembered the garden in Heaven, the glass dome high enough that trees flourished beneath it and did not brush the top, foliage everywhere and so thick that it could have been woven or layered to make a nice little shelter or hut to live in. In many more ways it looked nothing at all like the center of Heaven because Sam and Dean had based that idea on their own experiences and no one in the world had ever seen anything like Lucifer’s garden. Not since Eden.

“Close the door, you’re letting the stench of the world in,” Lucifer whispered against the back of Dean’s ear.

Dean whirled on him, startled and Lucifer slipped around a small tree out of his reach, laughing. “I thought you liked my world,” Dean said, his heartbeat slowing back to normal.

“I once believed it would make a fine foundation for something better,” Lucifer said, peeking at him through the branches of the tree. He let them go and they snapped back into place as he ducked beneath them and stood where Dean could see him. “Why do you come here whenever you dream?” he asked.

Dean blinked at him. “What?”

“Oh, don’t play dumb. You’re not,” Lucifer said, approaching him slowly. His nostrils flared as he scented the air and he cocked his head. “You smell like night sweat and I know you have terrors. I can hear you screeeeeeeamiiiiiiing.” He said the last in a mocking sing-song that made Dean’s skin prickle with goosebumps.

Lucifer reached him and stretched his head out to breathe in the smell of him. “Do you think of me when you scream like that, hmm?”

“Not usually, no,” Dean said, tilting his head back from him.

“Pity,” Lucifer said. “I should like to hear you scream quite like that while you’re thinking of nothing else. One day… Oh, I think one day.”

“I think not,” Dean said. He rolled his eyes and stepped around Lucifer to walk by him.

Lucifer followed him and fell into step beside him. “You wound me,” he murmured, leaning his head on Dean’s shoulder. “Am I not pretty enough for you? I have it on very good authority that I’m exactly your type these days.”

Dean shrugged him off. “No. Stop it,” he said.

Lucifer stepped in front of him and took Dean’s shoulders in his hands. “I have something to show you,” he said.

Dean raised a brow at him. “Yeah?”

“Yes,” Lucifer said. “Come with me,” he said and began tugging at Dean to follow him.

He looked so pleased with himself that Dean’s curiosity was piqued. He followed him down the path, past garden statues of Buddha and a dragon with three heads, past one of the many fountains to the base of a twisted tree. It was hollow inside and Lucifer liked to crawl up inside it and hide or sleep or do whatever it was that fallen angels did in dark, secluded places.

Lucifer called the tree the Merlin Tree because it made him think of how Merlin in the stories of King Arthur was betrayed and trapped forever inside of a tree. He liked the story for the way it ironically resembled his own.

At the base of the Merlin Tree, Lucifer knelt and ran his fingertips lightly over a beautiful, strange rose with lacy white and red striped petals. “This is my newest… creation,” he said softly.

He tilted his head back to look up at Dean and Dean’s hand itched with the sudden desire to touch him. Lucifer’s lips quirked a little like he knew this but he said nothing about it and returned his attention to his flowers.

“Here, crouch down. You should smell it,” Lucifer said, tugging lightly at the leg of Dean’s pants. “It’s wonderful. I kept trying and trying and finally. Finally. Dean, please?”

Dean knelt beside him and, trying to keep one cautious eye on Lucifer because he could still be unpredictably sneaky, he put his head out and breathed in the scent of the rose. “It smells like apples,” he said, surprised and delighted by the scent.

Lucifer rested his elbows on his knees and propped his face in his hands, grinning at him. “I know,” he said.

“You made these?” Dean asked.

“I made these,” Lucifer confirmed. “They’re the best I’ve made, don’t you think so?”

Dean had also liked the tulips with the blue petals that glowed in the dark like fireflies, but he had to admit, this was something on a completely different level of spectacular. “I think they’re great,” he said.

Lucifer’s smile widened ever so slightly and he suddenly leaned in close to Dean, crowding him so abruptly that he fell backward. “They are abominations,” he whispered. He plucked one from the grass, the thorns cutting into his fingers as he squeezed the stem and shoved the blossom beneath Dean’s nose. “Every single one, they are nothing but mutations of what God has created. Do you know why?”

Dean swallowed and shook his head no. He thought about shoving Lucifer back so he could get up, but he was acutely aware of the fact that he had gone into Lucifer’s domain of his own free will and that there, Lucifer was not powerless. Within the confines of his beloved garden, Lucifer was as powerful and strong as he had ever been. “I… no.”

“Because… Because I’m an angel. I can create nothing out of nothing,” Lucifer said. He crushed the rose blossom in his hand, his blood seeping between his fingers over the white petals as they sent up their luscious apple perfume. “Made in God’s image. You. And you can create anything out of nothing at all. You can dream it and make it reality. I? I have to take what he and you will give me and do what I can with it. Don’t you think… Dean, don’t you think that’s just the tiniest, itty-bittiest bit unfair?”

Dean stared back into Lucifer’s face, into Sam’s face, but there was no Sam in there anymore. Sam‘s face had been Lucifer‘s face for a long time. “I never really thought about it,” Dean said.

Lucifer tilted his head to the side and narrowed his eyes on Dean. He leaned his head out until his breath was warm on Dean’s chin and mouth. “Perhaps you should,” he hissed.

Before Dean could respond, Lucifer was gone. He moved like a creature that could never be mistaken for human, exactly like his nightmares; like he had bones and muscles where they didn’t belong, with a speed that was uncanny and almost alien to watch. He was off Dean in a flash and had disappeared inside the Merlin Tree, leaving Dean there in the grass with the crushed remains of the apple rose Lucifer had picked and a keen desire to return to his bed.

It took a little while after that before Dean dared to venture within the garden walls again. He still visited, but he would sit outside and look in or speak to Lucifer through the glass if the angel would deign to notice him at all. He didn’t truly believe that Lucifer would physically hurt him or try to kill him because to hurt him would lose him Dean’s company which the devil seemed to honestly enjoy, and to kill him would leave him locked forever in his garden without his pet gatekeeper to bring him new and interesting things to play with. Still, Dean kept the glass with all the magic carved into it between himself and Lucifer for some time. He had been wrong about such things before.

Watching Lucifer through the glass was a lot like watching a vicious animal at the zoo, though Lucifer himself didn’t seem to think of it that way. He went about his business the same as always, mating this plant with that one, grafting and manipulating until he got it just right. Sometimes he was pleased with his results, sometimes he wasn’t and sometimes he would go into murderous rages and destroy everything in sight. He always had to start over when that happened, but he was in a better mood afterward and didn’t seem to particularly mind it.

“Why do you do that?” Dean asked him one day when they were sitting together on their respective sides of the glass pane.

“Why do I do what?” Lucifer asked. He had a pile of flower blossoms in his lap from the plants he had destroyed in his anger and was now calmly braiding them into a crown.

“Why do you… ruin it all?” Dean said. “I mean… you do all that work, make such… They’re wonderful, you know.”

“Are they?” Lucifer asked, giving him a sharp look. He pricked his finger on a rose thorn and hissed, then put it in his mouth to suck the blood away.

“Yes, they are. They’re… fucking amazing and I think you know it,” Dean said.

“Maybe so,” Lucifer said indifferently. He pulled the stem of a blue daisy through the vine loop of a purple morning glory and seemed to forget Dean completely.

“So why?” Dean asked him again after a few minutes.

“Why not?” Lucifer said simply. “What good are they to me in here? I tire of their beauty, they mock me with what I cannot have and cannot do. What good are they to anyone?”

“They’re… beautiful,” Dean said, unable to think of a better answer.

“Oh yes? And what difference does that make?” Lucifer said. He tied the stem of a buttercup to the stem of a tea rose and looked up. “I was beautiful once. Look where I am. So… what does it matter?”

“I think it would matter,” Dean said softly. “I don’t know why or how or anything like that but… but it should.”

Lucifer laughed softly and shook his head. “What is beauty? You can’t eat it. You can’t build with it. It can’t slake your thirst or give you shelter. If you’re sick it can’t make you well. If you’re lonely it can’t give you joy. If I look at them all day long and I hate them, are they still beautiful?”

“If a tree falls in the woods and there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?” Dean said rhetorically.

He smiled and Lucifer smiled back, his eyes alight with amusement and mischief. “Precisely,” he said. He held up the finished flower wreath to show Dean. “What do you think?”

“You don’t really want to know what I think,” Dean said.

“Does it have the word ‘beautiful’ in it, hmm?” Lucifer asked.

“It might,” Dean said, lips quirking a little at the teasing.

“Well then… Perhaps you should come inside,” Lucifer said, eyeing him in that lascivious way that Dean had never really adapted to. “I’ll place it on your head and make you beautiful, too.”

Dean shook his head and got up from where he had been sitting on the floor. “I don’t think so,” he said.

Lucifer sighed. “Suit yourself. But you know, I can be alone with myself a lot longer than you can. I’ve had practice, haven’t I? Lots of practice. And after all,” he said, tapping a finger to his temple, “I’m never really alone in here.”

Dean started to leave then paused and turned back. “I thought about it,” he said. “What you said. I think you’re wrong.”

Lucifer raised his eyebrows at him enquiringly. “About which thing this time? You must be more specific.”

“About… you know, creating things,” Dean said. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans and dropped his eyes to the floor at his feet. This kind of philosophical discussion always made him uncomfortable, no matter how often it was demanded of him. “You create things. You… give birth to things. You created the first demons, didn’t you?”

Lucifer stared at him intently for a minute and then deliberately shifted his attention back to his flowers. He picked up the crown and set it atop his own head. “You should know better than that, Dean,” he said, his voice becoming a low, wicked purr. “You weren’t even subjected to my tender care and still… so close. You were almost mine already. That is how demons are made. The very fist of them were angels, fallen from Heaven for… of all things, for love of you. For humans. Can you believe that?”

Dean shook his head though he vaguely remembered something about it from a book. Something read over Sam’s shoulder many years before. “They’re not really… um… you know, all that affectionate these days.”

Lucifer laughed. “No, they wouldn’t be,” he said. “Look how they’ve suffered for their lust of mankind. If you think about it… really just… think about it… I never created them at all. They were perverted and I helped, I won’t deny it, but… really? You made them, not me.”

“Not me,” Dean automatically denied.

“Of course not you,” Lucifer said. “Men. In general.”

“That’s bullshit, that’s not true,” Dean said.

Lucifer stood slowly and moved to stand on the other side of the glass from Dean to look out at him between the symbol carvings. “You are precious to our father and we wonder, why are these insignificant, tiny, foolish, inconstant, mortal creatures so beloved?” Lucifer said softly, his body swaying to a rhythm in his own head against the glass as he stared out at Dean. He reminded Dean of a dancing cobra. “It is only natural that we would wonder such a thing, don’t you think so?”

Dean moved closer to the glass and looked into the garden at him. When Lucifer placed his hands against the glass panes, Dean lifted his hands to press them over them, palm to palm and finger to finger. “Yeah… I… Yeah.”

“I would not worship you, but I understand it. I do. It’s remarkable how everything that would be a weakness in an angel is what makes your kind so strong,” Lucifer said. “You feel time breathing like a monster down your neck, its jaws snapping at your heels and so you hurry. You make things because you can’t not make things. You love and it moves the world on the shoulders of Atlas. It transforms the mind of God, the way you can love. I have never encountered anything else like it. Nothing, not even my love could sway that one, but the least of you… The very least of you can shake Heaven to its knees.”

“What… does that have to do with demons?” Dean asked. He licked his lips and Lucifer’s gaze followed his tongue.

“It has everything to do with demons,” Lucifer said. He pressed his forehead to the glass and stared out at Dean with an expression on his features like a great wild cat might wear when looking down at a very small mouse. “How do you think they happen? How do you think we get into your heart and destroy you? Do you think we do it with hate? Or would love be a more creative and effective tool? Come on, Dean, you’ve been there. How would you do it?”

Dean realized he was breathing too deep and too fast and he tried to push himself away from the glass, but he couldn’t. He was weak and caught in Lucifer’s eyes like an insect in amber, which was exactly what he felt like when the angel fixed his impossibly ancient gaze upon him; like a bug.

“If you were charged with the task of breaking, utterly, a man’s heart, how would you do it?” Lucifer whispered to him.

Dean could feel the warmth of Lucifer’s fingers on the other side of the glass against his own and he whimpered as he strained once again to tear himself away. “Let me go,” he gasped, begging him.

“Go. Who is stopping you?” Lucifer said, but his lips curled at the edges in a smirk, confessing to the lie even as he spoke. “Tell me. Tell me how you would do it and… don’t lie.”

Dean closed his eyes and listened to his heart, commanding it to slow, measuring each breath between each heartbeat until he was steady again. He could taste the perspiration of his breath and skin on the glass between them. “With love,” he said, his voice a soft, strangled sound like the words were being ripped from him.

“Come again?” Lucifer said.

“You heard me,” Dean whispered.

“Yes, but did you?” Lucifer asked. “Say it again.”

“I would break his heart with love,” Dean said fiercely. “I would use his love to break him. I would torture him with his love until it became a twisted, fucking withered up thing inside—”

“That’s enough,” Lucifer said and suddenly Dean was free to move.

Dean staggered back and leaned back against the wall, breathing deeply like a man that has just escaped drowning. “How did you do that?” he panted.

Lucifer grinned at him and paced along the pane of glass then back again, watching Dean on the other side. For the first time, Dean felt like he was the animal in the zoo, not the zookeeper.

“How did I do that? How?” Lucifer asked him. He suddenly punched the glass and it fractured under his knuckles before the magic repaired it like water smoothing after a wave. “You are a stupid child. You have your monster, every monster you’ve ever screamed in the night to get away from and you’ve locked him up in a shoebox and punched holes in the lid. You saved him from all the angry little boys who wanted to squish him and how grateful is he now? I’m not a fairy tale, you silly little infant, I’m the devil!”

Dean’s responding anger was sudden and white hot. He shoved away from the wall and stood there trembling with the need to strike out, but he dared not touch the glass and risk Lucifer trapping him again.

“I should kill you,” Dean said through gritted teeth. “I should have killed you before.”

Lucifer tilted his head, studying him like Dean were a strange little animal that had just done something that was ever so slightly intriguing. “Yes, you should have,” he said. “But you corrupted my brother with your love and so here I am. And you… are just shit out of luck, sonny-boy.”

“I’ve got you, don’t I?” Dean snapped. “I can’t die and you can’t die and look where you’re at now. You’re not going anywhere. Some would say that’s worse than death.”

“Some what?” Lucifer asked with derision. “Some people?”

Dean scowled at him.

“Some people would say this is worse than death. Hmm, perhaps so,” Lucifer said, pacing again. He picked a pink rose as he passed it and began savagely plucking out the petals one at a time as he spoke. “Who says you cannot die? You haven’t aged a day, I’ll admit. Still as lovely as ever you were. But… you could walk out into the street and get hit by a bus. Do you think you would survive that, Dean?”

He didn’t know, but Dean had thought of that and it worried him. He didn’t have anymore lines on his face or grey in his hair, but he had been hurt since Michael left his body. He had cut his finger while slicing an apple just a few days before and it had scabbed and healed at the same slow pace he had always healed as a man. Over the years he had been bruised, scraped, cut, and even broken a toe once when he got up in the middle of the night drunk and fell over the sofa in his living room.

“Oh, look at you,” Lucifer purred. He flicked a crushed rose petal at him and it hit the glass and bounced off. “You know I’m right, don’t you?”

“I suspect it,” Dean admitted reluctantly.

“And maybe the next time no one will bring you back,” Lucifer said. “Do you suspect that, too?”

“Yeah,” Dean said.

“Yes. Because a human that lives forever is unnatural. Inhuman you might say,” Lucifer said.

“I know,” Dean said. He dragged a hand through his hair and sighed. “I know.”

“I suppose you also know, even if you never die, nothing lasts forever. This glass here where you’ve imprisoned me… What do you suppose the rate of decomposition is on your typical glass house? Or if there should be an earthquake and the ground should open up? What do you think would happen then?”

“Shut up,” Dean said. He dragged both hands through his hair again and started walking away. He felt very tired suddenly.

“You can’t keep me in here forever!” Lucifer called after him. He slammed his hand against the glass again, but Dean didn’t turn around.

“Maybe not. It doesn’t matter,” Dean said.

“Then let me go you impotent little baboon!” Lucifer shouted.

“No!” Dean shouted back, still not looking back at him.

“No,” Lucifer said, tone mocking, but his eyes flashed with such anger it was surprising the glass didn‘t melt. “No, no, no, no! Oh, you just wait, Dean Winchester. I will be free of this place again, just wait. I can wait! You can’t imagine how long I can wait! Patience is a virtue I excel at!”

“Whatever,” Dean said, and walked through the door at the end of the hall. He caught Lucifer’s eyes briefly and they stared into each other, more adversaries in that moment than they had been in years, then Dean smiled at him and closed the door.

After that, Dean didn’t visit Lucifer for about a month on either side of the glass. There were times when he woke up in the middle of the night and, fresh from a nightmare, he made it all the way to that door he had closed in Lucifer’s face, but he would stop there to gather his courage and the need would always pass.

The fear of death was once again upon him and with it came again that sense of urgency he had lost in the years following the anticlimactic little skirmish of their ‘Armageddon.’ Lucifer’s words echoed in his mind like a bell tolling the hour, like the tide ebbing, whispering, It’s coming. It’s coming soon. He had this new awareness of time’s passing that he had been without as a mortal man and it was this constant, nagging, painful presence, one more weight on his soul.

Dean was reading at the desk in his room, looking for something to ease his mind on the subject of the devil, when Castiel laid his hand on his shoulder and said his name. Dean tensed, but he didn’t jerk away from him or scream in surprise as he might have done in the early years of their acquaintance. He let out a deep breath, closed the book he had been reading and turned around in his chair to find Castiel standing there watching him with his sad blue eyes.

“Man, you look like you’re going to a funeral,” Dean said.

“Do I?” Castiel said. He looked down at himself in bewilderment. “I look no different.”

“You look like shit,” Dean said. “You want a drink?” he asked, reaching over the books on his desk to pick up the bottle of whiskey there.

Castiel moved around Dean to sit in the chair beside his desk and nodded. Dean smiled at him and poured three fingers into the glass he had been drinking from himself earlier. He passed it to Castiel and took his own drink straight from the bottle.

Castiel watched him drink then picked up his glass and downed it. “Thank you.”

“No problem,” Dean said. “So what’s up?”

Castiel shook his head and set his glass down. “Nothing is… up,” he said.

“The war in Heaven?” Dean asked, understanding more than Castiel would ever come right out and say.

“Yes,” Castiel said tiredly.

“You’re still losing,” Dean guessed.

“Yes,” Castiel said again. He took the bottle and poured himself another drink. “This is… I needed to take a step back.”

“And I’m your step back,” Dean said. “Well, that’s flattering.”

“I was not trying to praise you,” Castiel said dryly. He drank his drink. “I have nowhere else to go and no one else who would be glad to see me.”

“You missed me,” Dean said, smiling a little to show that he was teasing. “That’s sweet.”

Castiel smiled back at him. “Yes, I guess I have missed you.”

Dean refilled Castiel’s glass. “It’s my charming wit,” he said. He winked at Castiel and tipped the bottle up again to drink.

“Not your ‘perky nipples’?” Castiel said sarcastically.

Dean choked on a laugh and had to lower the bottle of whiskey to gasp for breath. “God, don’t do that, Cas,” he said. He coughed out a laugh and ran the back of his arm over his liquor wet mouth. “I sometimes wonder how long you’ve been watching me, you know.”

“If you were to ask, I might be compelled to tell you,” Castiel said.

“No way, dude. I’m scared to know,” Dean said. He poured Castiel another drink and drank again himself before setting the bottle down on the edge of the desk. “Alright… how long?”

“Your mother was newly pregnant for the first time,” Castiel said. He drank his drink and smiled faintly at the shocked look on Dean’s face. “Angels are watching over you,” he said.

“She used to say that,” Dean said softly. “When she put me to bed. That was… you? Really?”

“Yes,” Castiel said.

“Wow,” Dean said. “So you’re a long-time stalker then.”

Castiel chuffed out an amused sound. “I prefer the title of guardian,” he said.

“Yeah, I bet,” Dean said.

They sat there in companionable silence for a while and Dean refilled Castiel’s glass twice and drank from the bottle between. Dean finally broke the silence by asking, “What was it like?”

“What was what like?” Castiel said.

“You know… watching over me,” Dean said.

Castiel looked at him with narrowed eyes and frowned. “There is a specific answer you are looking for,” he said.

“It’s more like a theory I’m testing,” Dean said.

“You will not like it,” Castiel said.

“You know that?”

“I know you.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“You’re letting him get to you,” Castiel said. He leaned closer to Dean, resting his elbows on the desk. “You can’t do that. You can’t guard him as you must and allow him to touch you.”

“He doesn’t touch me,” Dean said, annoyed.

“I find that hard to believe,” Castiel said. “And to be clear, I do not mean in a physical sense, though now I do wonder.”

“Shut up,” Dean said, color flaring in his cheeks.

Castiel regarded him with his brows raised for a moment, then sat back with a sigh. “It was like watching a single cell through the lens of a microscope. Because of who you are, slightly more interesting to observe than your brethren, but still… tedious and largely irrelevant.”

Dean didn’t say anything for a few minutes, thinking that over. It was so similar to what Lucifer had been telling him that it made his stomach sink to hear it coming from Castiel.

“I don’t see it that way anymore,” Castiel said, trying to reassure him.

“Everyone or just me?” Dean said.

“You… and the world as a whole. Other individuals do not matter, though, no,” Castiel said.

Dean nodded. “Yeah. I know how that is.”

“I know you do,” Castiel said.

Dean refilled Castiel’s glass. He held the bottle up to the lamplight and peered through it. It was still about a third full. “I’ve got a few more of these around here somewhere,” Dean said. “You wanna get drunk with me?”

Castiel picked up his glass and tilted it against the side of Dean’s bottle. “Yes, I believe I am fully amenable to that idea.”

Dean woke up the next morning on the couch with the musty feather smell of a pillow weighing down on his face. He groaned and swatted it off on the floor. “Cas?”

The house was empty. Dean didn’t even have a cat or a dog. Of course, he had his very own pet devil, what did he need a dog for?

This thought made him snort laughter as he rolled off the couch and staggered to his feet. Lucifer wouldn’t speak to him for a year if he ever caught Dean treating him like a pet. Although Dean himself felt like he did it all the time when he would bring him things, usually seeds or shoots, but sometimes other things. It was like bringing home a rawhide bone or a catnip mouse for the tricks that Lucifer performed, but if he ever thought of it that way, he never let on or said a word.

Lucifer often compared himself to the hunted and trapped unicorn and though Dean thought it was a little melodramatic of him, when he started to go on about it, he sometimes made a weird sort of sense.

Dean nursed his hangover most of the day. He drank a glass of water, which made him throw up, drank another one that he managed to keep down and returned to the sofa to pass out. When he woke up again sometime in the evening, he brushed his teeth, fighting his gag reflex to keep from vomiting in the sink the whole time, then took a shower to wash off the alcohol sweat. He made coffee and his hands were shaking as he stirred sugar and powdered creamer into his first cup.

Somewhere out there, he hoped to God Castiel felt like he was dying, too.

After two cups of coffee and half a roll of soda crackers, Dean finally felt human enough to function. He poured another cup of coffee and walked through the house, drawing inevitably closer to the hallway door that would take him to the gates of the rose garden. He tried to pretend that wasn’t where he had always been going, but he couldn’t lie to himself about it. He knew and in all likelihood, wandering through his hybrid garden of mutations, Lucifer knew it, too.

He was waiting for him on the garden side of the glass when Dean opened the door and walked to the end of the hall and he smiled. Dean paused and they stood there regarding each other with calm understanding. It scared the hell out of Dean how much Lucifer understood him. It was almost as if he had known to the second when Dean would return to him.

“Hey,” Dean said, feeling awkward.

“Well, hello there,” Lucifer said. “Come to visit your menagerie again, have you?”

Dean sighed and pushed gently against the glass door. “I’m coming in. Step back,” he said.

Lucifer batted his eyes at him flirtatiously. “Not even a please? Have you forgotten that I am not your slave boy?”

Dean rolled his eyes and huffed out an annoyed breath. “I’ve missed you. Will you please step back so I can open the door?” he asked.

Lucifer stepped back and swept him a mocking bow, which looked all the more absurd because he was barefoot, dressed in white linen trousers and a shirt that was not buttoned—clothes that Dean suspected he only wore as a courtesy to him.

“Stop being a twat,” Dean muttered as he walked by him. “I don’t treat you like a slave.”

“Only because I’d rip your fucking heart out before I let you,” Lucifer muttered back, standing back up.

Dean glared at him. “Twat,” he said.

“I don’t currently have one, no,” Lucifer said dryly.

“You’re behaving like one,” Dean said.

Lucifer made a disgusted face. “Well… you’re behaving like a dick. What a marvelous pair we make.”

“Yeah,” Dean said, grinning at him. He held out the cup of coffee he’d carried down with him. “Here. This is for you.”

Lucifer inclined his head and sniffed it. “What is that? Coffee?”

“Uh… yeah,” Dean said. He felt a little embarrassed all of a sudden for offering him something so insignificant. “Sam always liked his with two creams and one sugar.”

Lucifer rolled his eyes up to peer at Dean through his lashes. Still watching him, he flicked his tongue out and lapped at the coffee in the cup. “Hmm and that is how you made it,” he murmured.

“You don’t like it,” Dean guessed. “Sorry. I just… It’s Sam’s body. I just thought… I don’t know what I thought.”

“I like it fine,” Lucifer said. He snatched the cup out of Dean’s hand, sloshing the hot liquid over both of their hands. He drank it while Dean shook his burned hand to cool it.

When he finished the coffee, Lucifer tossed the cup aside and shifted closer to Dean. He ran his tongue over his teeth and put his head out to scent him like a dog. “You smell like sour whiskey,” he said. “What else did you bring me? It’s not like you to make your peace offering with an afterthought cup of coffee. What else? Should I sniff it out like a dog hunting for treats in his master’s pockets? Would that please you? I bet it would.”

Dean took a surprised step back as Lucifer crowded him and held his hands out to his sides to show he had nothing else. “I don’t have anything. I’m sorry,” he said.

“You smell like my little brother,” Lucifer whispered, nuzzling his face into the side of Dean’s neck where his breath ruffled the hair by his ear. “My little brother, Castiel. What a strange creature he is, don’t you think so? Have you been playing house with my baby brother while you were away, Dean?”

“No, of course not,” Dean said, trying to push Lucifer off of him. Lucifer didn’t budge so Dean tried backing away from him only to come up short with his back against the glass doors. “We… Ah, he came to see me. He’s… There’s war in Heaven and he…”

“He’s losing it,” Lucifer murmured. He licked the curve of Dean’s neck and Dean tensed and jerked, trying to avoid it. Lucifer laughed softly and nipped him. “He shouldn’t feel bad. It was going to happen. Raphael is so much more experienced at it and unlike Castiel… he enjoys it.”

“Lucifer,” Dean hissed, shoving at him. “Stop it.”

“Perhaps I’m jealous,” Lucifer said, his eyes dancing with unvoiced laughter. “Perhaps I don’t like you smelling like other angels when you come back to me, Dean.”

“Perhaps it’s none of your goddamn business,” Dean snapped, shoving at him ineffectively again. “I’ll smell like whoever the hell I want to smell like. I’m not your… Yours.”

“Of course you are, don’t be foolish,” Lucifer said dismissively.

Dean put both hands to Lucifer’s chest and pushed. “Let me go,” he said, panting and alarmed by his nearness.

Lucifer brushed his mouth over the side of Dean’s neck to his ear and breathed there against the curve of his jaw. “Give yourself to me,” he whispered, his voice low and tempting. “You are so tired, do you think I don’t see it? Stop fighting me and let me go. I can give you rest. I can give you everything. I can save Heaven from Raphael and save your beloved Castiel from the violent death that awaits him. Just say yes and let me have you.”

“No,” Dean said. He wished he wasn’t as tempted by what Lucifer was promising him as he was, he wished that the refusal didn’t come to him more out of a knee-jerk reaction than a true feeling of denial, but he said it again and this time when he pushed at Lucifer, Lucifer let him go and stepped away. “No,” Dean said again.

Lucifer shrugged. “As you like it,” he said.

“Never,” Dean said more fiercely, stepping away from the door toward him.

Lucifer smiled. “Never say never,” he said in a soft sing-song.

“Never,” Dean said again.

“Yes, yes, I heard you,” Lucifer said, waving him off.

Dean turned around and pulled the doors open again, ready to flee back to his rooms. Lucifer made a soft sound in his throat like a whine and Dean halted, the door cracked open and his back turned. “I’m leaving. I can’t… I’ve got to stop doing this.”

“By ‘this’ of course you mean visiting me,” Lucifer said softly.

Dean looked at him over his shoulder and found Lucifer crouched down on his heels, eyes downcast at the earth as he flicked pebbles with his fingertips. “Why do you come here?” Lucifer asked. “You know he sleeps. You know that he doesn’t see you. So why?”

“I don’t know,” Dean said. He rubbed the bridge of his nose with his finger and thumb, the headache that had been threatening him since he woke up on the sofa with a horrible hangover flaring behind his eyes. “I don’t know why. Maybe it’s like when people visit their friends and relatives in a coma. They tell you they can’t hear you, but they also tell you that they can. If you read to them, if you visit them… they know.”

“That’s not why you visit me,” Lucifer said.

“How do you know?” Dean asked.

“Because I know,” Lucifer said. He didn’t move from where he had crouched on the ground, but he did look up. “Because you bring me things sometimes that Sam would have no use for. Because you will talk to me for hours and you know you’re not talking to him. I know.”

Dean rested his forehead against the edge of the door and let out a deep breath. “I don’t know why.”

“It’s a mercy that he sleeps,” Lucifer whispered. Dean’s shoulders tensed but he didn’t dispute it. “I could whisper a word in your ear and you would sleep, too. I could be as merciful to you as I am to your Sammy.”

“I’m really not that tired,” Dean lied. He left, closing the door behind him without allowing himself to look at Lucifer again.

Dean went back to his reading and spent the rest of that day and that night searching for anything to ease his mind about Lucifer and his own immortality. There wasn’t much literature on the subject of Satan that gave him much reassurance and as for his immortality… it seemed there was nothing at all. Dean was the first of his kind or else the first of his kind to be documented in anything other than fairytales and science fiction.

He went to bed sometime early in the morning and lay there without sleeping for hours, his mind racing, rolling what he had read over and over in his mind. No matter how he looked at it, it never seemed any different, any better. Dean was still afraid, he still felt the breath of death on his neck, and he would have been satisfied with anything at all that could have shined light of any kind on his situation. But there was nothing. There had never been a situation quite like his own before.

The next afternoon, Dean returned to the garden, this time with his pockets full of flower seeds, carrying with him a decorative concrete horse. He found Lucifer on his knees by a fountain at the center of the garden, washing his face and hands in the icy water. When he approached, Lucifer didn’t look up or even pause in what he was doing, though he had to know that Dean was there.

“I brought you something,” Dean said, standing behind him.

Lucifer shook his wet hands out, wiped them on the thighs of his trousers, and stood. “Oh yes, what is it this time? A cup of tea?”

“Don’t be an asshole,” Dean said. He put the heavy concrete horse down. “I brought you another animal.”

Lucifer looked over at it and snickered. “Another animal for your little zoo,” he said. “And I’m the only fabulous creature you ever visit. I feel so special.”

Dean sat down beside him and stretched his legs out. “You’re the only fabulous creature here,” he said.

Lucifer turned around and flopped down in the grass on his belly. “Not so,” he said. There was a dandelion near one of his hands and he picked it and turned it on its stem between his finger and thumb so it twirled like an umbrella. “Just the other day the hydra hit one of her fifty heads on the ceiling fan. Destroyed it completely so now she’s up to fifty-one. It’s given her quite the complex. She keeps counting them and weeping every time she comes up with the same odd number.”

Dean laughed. “You haven’t knocked off one of the dragon’s heads, have you?” he asked.

Lucifer gave him an offended look. “Moi? I never. Why would I destroy your lovely gift?”

“Fit of temper,” Dean said.

“Ah, yes. Unfortunately that does happen,” Lucifer said. He reached up and slipped the dandelion behind Dean’s ear. “There’s also the sphinx. She’s a horrible conversationalist.”

Dean supposed he must mean the lion statue on the east side of the garden. “Do you actually try to talk to them?” he wondered.

“Why wouldn’t I?” Lucifer asked. He seemed honestly curious. “They are my only companions these days. I don’t even get ladybugs and mantises in here. I’m also partial to serpents. You may have heard. Or bees, which I keep meaning to complain to management about. It’s tiring as hell to pollinate every flower and blossom by hand.”

“I thought you liked it,” Dean said.

“Mhmm and you never ask, do you?” Lucifer said.

Lucifer had pink and white tea roses tangled in his hair so that they almost looked like they were growing there. He picked one from near his brow and offered it to Dean. “The pink ones smell like lemonade.”

Dean took the flower and smelled it. Lucifer smiled at him and shifted to prop himself up on one elbow. “The tree is growing figs this year,” he said. “Would you like one?”

“That depends,” Dean said. “Do they taste like beef jerky or something?”

Lucifer chuffed laughter and shook his head. “They taste like figs. I’ve been eating them all month. Want one?”

Dean considered the wisdom of eating anything that Lucifer gave him, especially something that grew from the branches of the Merlin Tree. He decided the intelligence of doing something like that fell into the same category as voluntarily drinking something laced with Rohypnol. “No thanks,” he said.

“Think I might poison you?” Lucifer asked. “I admit, the thought has crossed my mind.”

“That’s reassuring,” Dean said.

“It should be,” Lucifer said cheerfully. “I’d much rather beat you to death, but oh look, you’re still alive.”

“Why’s that?” Dean asked.

“I have remarkable reserves of patience and restraint,” Lucifer said.

“Uh-huh,” Dean said. He didn’t believe him for a moment. “You won’t kill me.”

“I’m not bored with you yet,” Lucifer said.

“Bullshit,” Dean said. He reached over and put the lemonade rose back in Lucifer’s hair.

Lucifer caught his hand and held his wrist. “There’s also the dormouse,” Lucifer whispered, his expression both cruelly sharp and intensely watchful as he shifted to sit up and lean toward Dean.

“Who’s the dormouse?” Dean said, his voice cracking with nervousness as Lucifer’s grip on his wrist gentled and his fingers petted his skin. “I… I’ve never brought you a mouse.”

“The dormouse is the dormouse,” Lucifer said. He tapped the forefinger of his free hand to his temple. “He sleeps all the live-long day and night.”

Dean felt himself go momentarily numb with shock. Lucifer rarely ever mentioned Sam anymore and when he did, it wasn’t with such cruel intent. “Stop it,” he said.

“He doesn’t like it when I call him that either,” Lucifer said. “I tell him it’s an endearment, but he doesn’t believe me.”

“I thought you said he was sleeping,” Dean said softly. He didn’t know why he should be so surprised or feel so betrayed by the lie.

“He does sleep. Did you know that he snores and talks in his sleep?” Lucifer said. “But then I get so lonely, especially when you go off in a snit and stay away for months and months. I have to talk to somebody, don’t I? I get bored.”

“I’m sorry,” Dean said. “Please… Don’t wake him up anymore.”

“He’s sleeping now,” Lucifer reassured him. “Twinkle, twinkle little bat, how I wonder where you’re at,” he murmured in a soft little singing way that made Dean’s skin crawl.

Dean put his hand out to rest it on Lucifer’s shoulder and hold him back. “Promise me,” he said.

Lucifer smiled at him and cocked his head. “What will you give me if I promise?”

“Give you?” Dean said incredulously. “You already have everything.”

“Such a little liar, Dean Winchester, but I’ll forgive you,” Lucifer said. He leaned closer to him and released Dean’s wrist to put his hand out and catch his chin, tilting his head back and pulling him gently forward with his fingers. “A kiss for your little lying tongue and I promise.”

“No,” Dean said and jerked, but when Lucifer tightened his fingers a little, he stilled. If he had wanted to free himself he could have, but Lucifer made a soft purring sound in his throat and Dean closed his eyes and leaned into him. “I can’t do this,” he whispered.

“Give yourself to me,” Lucifer whispered back, his mouth brushing over Dean’s lips. “I will give you rest. I can restore the balance.”

Dean felt his eyes sting as tears rose up under his eyelids and beaded on his lashes. “Maybe you can, but would you?”

“What does it matter to you now?” Lucifer asked. He pressed a kiss to the corner of Dean’s mouth and kissed up to his eyes to taste his tears. “If I do or if I do not, what difference does that make to you now?”

“It matters,” Dean said. He felt his tears slide down his cheeks and shivered when Lucifer’s warm tongue ran over his cheek in their path to the hollow of his eye. “It can’t all have been for nothing.”

Lucifer smiled and leaned back to look at him, Dean with his neck stretched out toward Lucifer, his eyes closed and shining paths of despairing tears in trails down his face. He leaned back in and pressed soft kisses to Dean’s mouth, teasing at his lips and teeth with his tongue until Dean opened for him to lick inside. “Yes it can,” he murmured as he kissed him. “Things happen for no reason all the time.”

“No,” Dean whispered, but not like he believed it. “No. It’s not for nothing. Not this time.”

“This time and every time before,” Lucifer murmured back to him, moving his kisses along Dean’s cheek to his jaw, mouth brushing over his ear. “You fought valiantly. Let me have you now and be at ease.”

Shaking, so tempted by what was being offered that it terrified him, Dean lifted his hands to Lucifer’s shoulders and pushed as he turned his head away from his lying tongue. “You are such a manipulative fucking… Get off me. Now.”

Lucifer laughed and dropped a last quick kiss to Dean’s shoulder. “Manipulative? Such sweet things you say to me,” he said, and rolled away from Dean to lie on his back in the grass beside him.

“Shut the fuck up,” Dean grumbled, sitting there with his face in his hands as he calmed his heavy breathing.

“You say that so often. I would expect better from you,” Lucifer said.

“Yeah, well I guess when I’m upset I go right back to kindergarten,” Dean said. He dragged his hands through his hair and sat there with his hands there and his hair sticking out between his fingers. “You are such an asshole.”

“You love me,” Lucifer said, teasing him. “Don’t be a monkey about it, Dean. Just accept it.”

“Seriously, shut up,” Dean snapped.

“Seriously… no,” Lucifer said. “Although if you would like to attempt forcing the issue, that might be entertaining.”

“God,” Dean muttered in a frustrated sigh.

“Not here. I’ve looked,” Lucifer said brightly.

Dean coughed out a humorless laugh and shook his head, lowering his hands back to his lap. “I am such a goddamn masochist,” he mumbled. “I know I should stay the fuck out of here, but I can’t seem to leave you alone.”

Lucifer smiled up at the sky through the glass over their heads and said nothing. The sun was setting and it was starting to rain, misty droplets patting against the windowpanes, distorting the view of the sky.

Dean sat there for a few more minutes without saying anything else, regaining his self control. After a while, he said, “I brought you seeds, too. The… If you don’t want the horse, I’ll take it out, but I just thought…”

“Thank you,” Lucifer said. “That is what you wanted to hear, isn’t it? Thank you?”

“I don’t know,” Dean said. He sighed and got up from the ground. He took the packets of flower seeds out of his pockets and dropped them on the grass, then turned and walked away down the path back to the gates.

Lucifer followed him down the path and came up behind him. “Not even going to say goodbye?” he whispered against the back of Dean’s ear.

Dean froze and took a deep breath, let it out and pulled the doors open. “I’ll come back tomorrow,” he said.

“Promises, promises,” Lucifer said, chiding. He stepped back to let Dean go.

Dean walked through the doors and held Lucifer’s steady, cold gaze as he pulled them closed again. “It’s not a promise.”

In the night, Dean woke from nightmares and got so tangled up in his sheets that he nearly rolled from the bed onto the floor. He woke with the smell of sulfur deep in his lungs, biting his own forearm to keep from screaming so hard that he was bleeding into his mouth. In his mind, from the deeper shadows of the room, Lucifer’s soft voice, sounding so like Sam’s, whispering, Take me to you, imprison me, for I… except you enthrall me, never shall be free, nor ever chaste… except you ravish me… Dean laughed, hysteria threatening to bubble up and overflow into complete madness inside him. Echoes of Satan’s laughter were like rocks thrown in a cave, tickling his mind with maddening insistence.

He pulled the sheets over his head and buried his face in his pillows, impossibly trying to block it out. “Stop it,” he whispered, begging. It didn’t come again, but Dean could hear it anyway, clanging in the back of his mind. “Stop it.”

The sheets tried to trip him as Dean suddenly scrambled out of the bed and he kicked them, cursing. He left his room and went down the stairs in the dark, feeling along the wall so that in his angry, frightened, half-awake state he wouldn’t fall and break his neck. Once he made it to the main landing, he could see. The light came through the skylight overhead in the garden and shined through the glass into the house surrounding it, giving him just enough light to see by.

Dean stood in front of the door that would take him down the short hallway to the gates into the garden. He stared at it, like it was a mirror he could see into rather than dark, solid oak. He didn’t want to go in there now that he was standing before it. No, that wasn’t quite right; he didn’t want to want it like he did. The closed door seemed to mock him with this self-denial and Dean dropped his head against the hardwood door once with a thunk as he twisted the knob and pushed it open.

Lucifer was not waiting for him when Dean entered the garden. He had half expected him to be there, waiting with a jeering look on his face, but the garden was dark and if he didn’t know better he would think it was deserted. The moon lit up the garden enough that the darkness wasn’t impenetrable and it was further lit by the internal light of small moss flowers which glowed in the trees, along the stalks of leafy plants and between the bricks of the pathway like bright little sparklers. They were like tiny little bar lights and when Dean got down on his knees to examine them, the flowers close to where he breathed closed, their lights extinguishing.

Dean looked up and slowly got to his feet, feeling like he was still trapped in his own dreams. He wasn’t even sure this wasn’t true as most of the time he spent in the garden felt like dreaming once he left. He could never really be sure he was awake.

The path lit his way through the garden, circling in a spiral like the Yellow Brick Road to where the Merlin Tree grew with its twisted, tortured looking branches reaching for the sky beyond the glass. At first, Dean didn’t see Lucifer and thought he must be curled up inside the tree sleeping or whatever the fallen angel equivalent of that was. He stepped off the path and walked around the tree, admiring the patterns of the glowing moss flowers, and he almost fell over Lucifer who was on his knees in the crotch of two tree roots.

“Goddamnit!” Dean said, stumbling back from him into a flowering bush. “What the hell are you doing now?”

Lucifer continued to kneel there with his hands cupped together in a fist, his forehead resting on them. Dean waved his hand in front of him, trying to get his attention, but Lucifer didn’t even flinch. Dean squatted down to peer at him and thought he heard him whispering, talking to himself, but it wasn’t a language he understood. It wasn’t even a language similar to anything he had ever heard before.

“Hey,” Dean said, again trying to get Lucifer’s attention.

Nothing.

Dean reached out; sure deep down that it was a bad idea and touched his shoulder. Lucifer stopped talking and drew in a deep breath then he raised his head and his eyes glowed like a wild animal’s. Dean fell as he scrambled back from him, but Lucifer didn’t pursue him, just tracked him with his strange eyes until he froze.

“What… ah… What are you doing?” Dean asked.

“I could ask you the very same thing,” Lucifer said softly. He stood slowly and Dean tried to shrink away from him, afraid like a tiny animal in the jaws of a dragon and Lucifer laughed. “I was praying.”

Dean swallowed and shook his head; sure he hadn’t heard him right. “What?”

“Is it so strange to think that I might talk to God?” Lucifer asked. He tilted his head back to look up at the starry sky through the glass overhead and he sighed. “I do. I have. Sadly, the son of a bitch does not often reply.”

“Often?” Dean asked, almost choking on the word. “God talks to you?”

Lucifer’s teeth flashed white in the gloom and he shook his head. “Perhaps I only imagine he does,” he said. “Most of the time I feel like I’m talking to a dead loved one. Every so often, he has something to add to the conversation, but he‘s always been a stubborn sort, you know.”

“A stubborn sort,” Dean repeated. Cautiously watching Lucifer, he crawled to his knees and got to his feet, hoping that would make him feel less intimidated by the devil towering over him. It didn’t really help much.

“Yes,” Lucifer said. “You must understand that this has been going on for a very long time. Thousands of years before anyone thought of marriage counseling.”

“Marriage counseling,” Dean said doubtfully.

“Yes,” Lucifer said, glaring at him. “Am I not speaking clearly in your simple monkey language? Why must you repeat everything I say?”

“Sorry,” Dean said. He started to shove his hands into his pockets but he was wearing his pajama pants and just wiped his palms over his thighs instead. “It’s just… It’s God.”

“Mhmm, which is no excuse for bad behavior,” Lucifer said. He stepped over a root and moved around the tree, not waiting for Dean to follow him.

Dean stumbled over something and cursed, holding onto the side of the tree for balance. Ahead of him, Lucifer reached up into the branches of the Merlin Tree and cupped a fruit blossom in his hand. It unfurled and the petals glowed like the veins of the flower were the filaments of light bulbs. He walked along tapping the blossoms in the tree along his way until the center of the garden was lit up like they were under streetlights.

“Why are you here?” Lucifer asked him, turning on him as Dean was stepping down from one of the roots of the Merlin Tree. Dean lost his balance and cursed, but Lucifer caught his arms and steadied him. Dean immediately struggled against him, but Lucifer tightened his fingers painfully until he stopped. “Don’t be idiotic.”

Lucifer let him go when he stopped fighting and Dean dragged his hands through his hair, his heart racing and his fingers shaking. “I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry,” Lucifer muttered. He rolled his eyes and sat on the edge of the fountain at the center of the garden. “You are more and more afraid of me these days, Dean. Yet… here you are. Answer my question please.”

“I had a nightmare,” Dean said.

“Yes,” Lucifer said encouragingly. “And when you entered my garden, you were furious, weren’t you?”

“Yes,” Dean said. He frowned thoughtfully, only just realizing this. He tried to remember when the anger had left, but he couldn’t pinpoint the moment. Almost from the instant he entered the garden, it was gone.

“And?” Lucifer prodded.

Dean stared at him and suddenly he knew without a doubt that Lucifer hadn’t been praying. He hadn’t been talking to God, he had been working some kind of satanic voodoo on Dean’s mind. He had been talking to him. “You,” he said, taking a step closer to the fountain, his anger rising again as his instinct became conviction and for a moment he forgot that Lucifer was Lucifer.

Which was a very stupid thing to do.

“I,” Lucifer said. “Do not presume to think you know me, Dean Winchester. Me? God himself does not know my heart, you conceited little ape.”

Dean laughed at him and stepped out of the grass back onto the path. “Why the fuck can’t I stay away from you?”

Lucifer grinned. “I have not seen that movie. Don’t spoil it for me,” he said.

“What?” Dean said and he had heard him, he just couldn’t quite believe it. “Is everything a fucking joke to you?”

“No,” Lucifer said thoughtfully. “Although I’ve found there to be very little that cannot be made into one.”

“You weren’t praying,” Dean said.

Lucifer raised a brow at him and rolled his eyes up as he considered this. “I can’t always be sure of these things, but I’m fairly certain this time that I was. What is your point?”

“My point, you fucking liar, is that you were messing around with my head. You don’t pray. What would you pray for? Who would listen?” Dean said.

Lucifer stood up from the edge of the fountain and paced, tapping the tip of one finger to his bottom lip. He seemed to be giving serious consideration to this like it was a problem to be solved. “Firstly; I do not lie. I’ve told you this time and again and I hate it when you make me repeat myself. I may exaggerate from time to time, but I have to find my fun somewhere, don’t I?” Lucifer said.

“Whatever,” Dean muttered. He wrapped his arms around himself and looked down at his bare feet with the moss flowers glowing around his toes. “I don’t believe you then.”

“Which does not make it a lie,” Lucifer snapped. “Furthermore; you do not know me and you do not know God and yet you presume… constantly to know the mind and heart of us both. I pray. I was praying when you came in here with your infernal arrogance buzzing in my head like this poisonous cloud of insects and here you stand and you dare to blame your own broken mind, your own time madness, on me.”

“How would I know if you were fucking around in my head or not?” Dean demanded. “How would I—?”

“Oh,” Lucifer said softly. “You would know.”

He whirled, a thorn bough in his hand, and whipped Dean across the face with it. The tiny thorns caught in his skin and ripped a shallow cut open across his right cheek. Dean’s hand went to his face and he stared at Lucifer in complete shock. He was usually mocking, often cruel, sometimes angry, but he had never actually struck him. Dean had naively believed, deep down where he hardly even admitted it to himself that Lucifer never would. He would stop short of such a thing.

Dean’s dismay froze him for a few seconds and Lucifer struck him again, the bough catching him across the ear and over the backs of his knuckles where he had pressed his hand over the first cut. He quickly backed away from Lucifer who whipped the thorn branch at him again and advanced on him.

“What was it this time?” he asked Dean, his voice a low, menacing growl. “What did you dream? What did I make you see? Tell me!”

Dean backed away from him, his eyes wide and near paralyzing terror surging in him. It was a familiar feeling, one he knew well from his last years with Sam and it literally stole his ability to fight back. “What?” he managed, his voice breaking and forced.

“Tell me your dream,” Lucifer hissed at him, whipping the thorn bough at Dean again, but this time more teasing. More like one might snap a quirt at an animal to train it or direct it. “Tell me or I will flay the hide from your bones!”

Dean threw up his hands to ward him off and protect his face if Lucifer struck out at him again. “Wait!” Dean shouted when the tip of the thorn branch snapped against his palm. “I don’t remember!”

“Now who’s lying?” Lucifer snarled. He seized one of Dean’s wrists and glared down at the welt across his hand then at Dean when he violently flinched away from him. His expression softened a little at the sight of the small cut across Dean’s cheek and his hand on his wrist gentled. “Tell me what you remember.”

Dean swallowed thickly and kept his eyes closed. It was a false kind of safety, like a bird with its head in the sand, but he wasn’t ready to open them yet. His heart was pounding painfully in the back of his throat. He felt Lucifer’s mood shift in the way his hand on Dean’s arm went from claw-like to carefully holding, but it didn’t ease his fear much. Lucifer’s disposition was as mercurial as a time bomb, the only question being when, not if, it would go off.

“Tell me,” Lucifer murmured, drawing closer to Dean. He breathed along Dean’s forearm, his breath stirring the fine hairs there until Dean’s skin raised with goosebumps and he shivered. Lucifer smiled at his reaction and softly ran his tongue over the sore bite mark where Dean had bit himself screaming himself awake. Dean tensed and Lucifer tightened his grip on Dean’s wrist. “Ah-ah. Shhh. Tell me. Why so secretive? You came down here to rant at me and now you’ve gone mute. Tell me, tell me, tell me, was it scary? Hmm? Was it sad? Ohh, was it erotic?”

“I don’t remember it,” Dean whispered. He opened his eyes and found Lucifer’s face—Sam’s face—right there. He caught his breath and let it out slowly. “I don’t remember. Let me go.”

Lucifer glared at him. “I don’t believe you.”

“I remember your voice,” Dean said hastily.

“My voice or his voice?” Lucifer asked. “We are so alike these days, you know.”

“I don’t know,” Dean confessed. This bothered him, too. It upset him that Sam was so like Lucifer in his mind now, that Lucifer, who was nothing like Sam and made even Sam’s body look different than he knew it had once been, was so entwined with Sam in his mind now. “I don’t know. I… Let me go, I don’t know. It could have been him. It could have been.”

“But you don’t think so,” Lucifer said. “Tell me what we said, hmmm? Was it nasty?”

“No,” Dean said. “It was just… poetry.”

He felt ridiculous the moment he said it, but he remembered the terror and anger he’d felt at the time and he returned Lucifer’s gaze defiantly.

“Poetry,” Lucifer said. “What poetry?”

Dean tried to take his arm away from Lucifer, suddenly embarrassed, but Lucifer held on. He sighed. “Take me to you, imprison me, for I, except you enthrall me, never shall be free, nor ever chaste except you ravish me,” he recited from memory, his voice barely above a whisper.

Lucifer was quiet so long that Dean thought he might not say anything. Finally, he let Dean’s wrist go and paced away from him a little before coming right back, his face right up close to Dean’s. “How fitting, don’t you think so?” he asked. “John Donne, poor man. I knew him well. You know… he was speaking to God when he wrote that. Can you imagine? Begging God to rape you?”

Dean shook his head and twitched away from him when Lucifer put his hand against Dean’s hurt cheek. Lucifer made a sound of negation in his throat to stop him backing away and touched the cut with his fingertips. It stung but not unbearably and Dean looked back at him and held his gaze.

“What do you think it means?” Lucifer asked him.

Dean cautiously lifted his own hand and when Lucifer didn’t withdraw from him, he cupped his cheek and looked into his face, searching as he hadn’t done in years for Sam there in his eyes. Castiel had once called it the ‘divine spark’ and Dean had known exactly what he meant. He searched Lucifer’s face for a hint of Sam’s shadow hiding there like a koi in dark water.

“I miss him,” Dean whispered. He swallowed around the urge to cry and fought it back. “I don’t know what it means, but I miss him so goddamn much. Most of the time I can handle it if… if I don’t think about it. And I hate you sometimes because you’re in his place—”

“Not quite,” Lucifer said.

Dean put a finger over his lips to shush him. “I forgive you,” Dean murmured.

Lucifer blinked at him in honest surprise. “You forgive me?” he said, ignoring the finger over his mouth.

“Yes,” Dean said.

“For what?”

“For everything.”

“No one forgives me,” Lucifer said. He slid his hand around to cup the back of Dean’s neck.

Dean allowed himself to be pulled closer and returned Lucifer’s incredulous expression with a mild look of his own. “No one prays for you, either,” he said.

Lucifer made a surprised sound of amusement and shook his head. “Of course not,” he said. His amusement quickly disappeared to be replaced by puzzlement. “I would not have thought you so without mercy,” he said softly.

Dean frowned at him. “You made sure of it,” he said.

“I? Oh no, I have been kind to you,” Lucifer said. His fingers massaged the nape of Dean’s neck. “I promised you everything. I offered you worlds. How have I been unmerciful?”

“I can’t let you go,” Dean whispered. “I’m sorry, I can’t.”

“And such cruelty,” Lucifer said, his tone almost loving. “Under other circumstances, I would be so proud. You’re quite the apt pupil.”

Dean huffed out a tired breath and shook his head. “I can’t live without him, either. I can’t—I can’t live like this.”

“Ah,” Lucifer said, lips curving into a wicked smile. “But there is a compromise, huh? I have offered you the way.”

“Give myself to you, yeah,” Dean said dully. “I don’t know if I can do that either.”

“Well, you’re going to have to do something aren’t you? Doing nothing is rarely an option in such cases, is it?” Lucifer said.

“I know,” Dean said. He miserably lowered his head. “Don’t you think I know that?”

Lucifer stretched his neck out and put his mouth close to Dean’s ear to whisper. “I’ll let you pretend that I’m him, hmm? Would that be easier? I’ll be as much like your Sammy as I know how to be and oh, the things I know.”

“That’s not… I can’t do that. I can’t do that, you’re not him,” Dean said. “But that’s not what I mean. I mean… I don’t want to know. I don’t want to know anything, you know? After. I just… I want things to be like they were. Can you do that?”

“You don’t want to know anything? Well, that might be rather upsetting all around, don’t you think?” Lucifer said.

“You know what I mean,” Dean said. “Can you do it?”

“I can make you believe you’ve lived your entire life as the queen of England. I can do anything,” Lucifer said, purring the words seductively as he flicked his fingertip over the lobe of Dean’s ear.

“Don’t fuck with me,” Dean said, pleading with him. “Please be serious.”

“You hurt my feelings, Dean,” Lucifer said. He grinned, but the smile slowly faded and he sobered. “I’ll take you inside of me and put you right there where Sam has been sleeping all these years. I’ll give you a world and it won’t be perfect, but you’ll have everything you need and some of what you want. You’ll not remember me, you’ll not remember any of it.”

“You’ll destroy the world,” Dean said. It was the one thing that still made him hesitate.

“Why would I do that? The only way I ever touch God is through the things in this world. Through you, you creatures made in his image. He won’t show himself to me, but I can have as many of you as I want,” Lucifer said. “But assume for a moment that I intend to tear it down to the floor of Hell. What do you care? I promise you, you won’t know, you will never suspect and you will live happily ever after right up here.” He tapped his temple with a finger and raised his eyebrows at Dean. “I even promise right here and now to spare your loved ones. If it comes to that, of course.”

“Bobby,” Dean said. He hadn’t seen Bobby in years. So many years he had lost count, in fact.

“Bobby is long dead, Dean,” Lucifer told him. “Beyond my grasp.”

Dean gaped at him, the loss hitting him like a punch. “What? Bobby’s dead. When?”

Lucifer looked at him pityingly. “At least thirty years now,” he said.

“It’s been that long?” Dean whispered, hardly able to believe it.

“Longer,” Lucifer said.

“I didn’t know,” Dean said and he grieved. It was new to him and he grieved like Bobby had only died the day before. “There’s no one else then.”

“No one? Are you sure?” Lucifer asked.

“Cas,” Dean said. “Castiel. He’s not dead either, I just saw him.”

“He could still be dead,” Lucifer said like he couldn’t help himself. At the stricken look on Dean’s face, he relented and said, “But he’s not.”

“Okay,” Dean said. He took a deep breath, felt it hitch in his chest. “Okay then.”

“My sweet little brother. I’ll tell him you said goodbye,” Lucifer said.

Dean could only nod, his heart thundering so heavily it made him feel feverish, his eyes hot in his skull and his stomach twisting nauseously. “I can’t,” he whispered.

“You can,” Lucifer whispered back, leaning into him to brush his lips over the curve of Dean‘s neck. “It’s a simple word. One syllable. You’ve said it when it meant less.”

“Yeah, but not when it meant this much,” Dean said. “Hardly ever. I… I can’t do this. I can’t. I’m sorry.”

“Shh, you can,” Lucifer said. He petted his fingers in the back of Dean’s hair and put his other arm around his waist.

Dean hated himself in that moment not only for his weakness, but for the yearning deep down inside him that made him shift into him and welcome the embrace. “I can’t. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, oh God, I’m so sorry, I can’t say it, I can’t let you, I can’t—”

“Hush,” Lucifer said gently. He urged Dean off the pathway toward the grass and nuzzled his shoulder, murmuring into his skin as he touched him. “You can. You lose nothing and think of what you gain. Everything. And you’re so tired. Aren’t you tired, Dean? I know you are. And Sammy, he’s waiting. I can give him to you. Just as he was, just as you were. Do you remember? All you have to do is all you have to do. Give yourself to me. Say yes. It’s an old, old song, you know the words.”

Dean fought against him briefly then, but without much strength or heart. He made a soft, tortured keening sound and rested his head against Lucifer’s chest, comforted in spite of himself by the soothing murmur of his voice and the soft petting of his hands. He could feel himself yielding, every moment, every cell, every tachyon that composed him, particles from the dawn of time floated somewhere in his body and called to similar particles in Sam’s body and he was going to say yes.

Something Castiel had once said to him on the battlefield came to him then and summed it up perfectly. Dean had been sitting on a park bench with a dried up whiskey bottle in his hand, wishing for another one though he was as drunk as he could be already. Castiel sat down beside him and didn‘t speak for a long time. The sun was going down, one of the brightest, most beautiful sunsets that Dean would ever see painting the sky in shades of rainbow colors, but he was feeling much too sorry for himself to appreciate it. Castiel reached over and took the empty bottle from Dean. He held it up and peered through it, then threw it. The bottle hit a tree and shattered into dust. The angel stood then and looked down at him and said, “Fate punches holes in us all.” Dean had understood it then, though it had meant something different to him at the time and it had been like a slap in the face.

Now it was more like a stake through the heart.

“Sam. He’ll be different, won’t he?” Dean asked. He could feel his own damnation like rot in his bones, but how was that different from the unnatural way he was living, tethered to the garden and Satan in his cage? “Won’t he?”

“A little,” Lucifer admitted. “You’ll be a little different to him, too. I won’t change you. But I can make you forget and what you make of that is up to you. Do you want that? Say yes. Say that you want it. Tell me.”

“What you want to hear,” Dean said.

“Oh yes, I do. Indeed, I do,” Lucifer said.

Lucifer started to kneel there before him in the grass and he looked to Dean like a suitor getting ready to propose. Dean tried to pull him back up and when that failed, he slid to his knees in the grass with him.

“Don’t make me say it,” Dean said, his head bowed like he was praying himself. “Please. Don’t make me. I can do it, just… don’t make me say it.”

“You have to say it,” Lucifer said. He took Dean’s hands and Dean looked up, so tired, so torn and ruined. “I can’t make you, you have to say it.”

Dean licked his lips and nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Okay.”

Lucifer looked at him with those glowing animal eyes, hungry and glowing by some inner light. A divine spark, though not like his own or any other human’s at all. Lucifer touched Dean’s cheek, his fingers touching on the sore cut there. Dean hissed in surprised pain but he didn’t shrink from the touch, he leaned into it.

“Do we have a deal? An agreement? An accord, if you will?” Lucifer said eagerly.

“Yes,” Dean said, the word passing his lips like it hurt him to say it. Once he said it, he said it again and it was easier with the repetition. A relief, really. “Yes, yes, yes. Oh God, yes.”

“Ah,” Lucifer said, a breathy sound like a sigh of ecstasy. He put his other hand on Dean’s other cheek and drew him close. “Yes, yes, yes, yes.”

Dean could taste his breath, sweet and slightly spicy then Lucifer licked his mouth and Dean immediately opened to him, a whimper in the back of his throat. He was ashamed. Once again, he hadn’t been strong enough. He hadn’t been as strong as he believed himself to be, as strong as he wanted to be, as strong as he needed to be. He had said the word and come down from the rack again, failed again, been weak again.

“A kiss to seal it,” Lucifer said and kissed him.

Dean moaned and kissed him back, reaching for him to find Lucifer there waiting. As they kissed, tongues stroking together in a mimicry of sex, Dean began to gradually relax. He felt more calm and yet excited. He pulled Lucifer closer and Lucifer went willingly, laughing softly as he tumbled Dean onto his back in the grass.

The glow of the moss flowers danced in Lucifer’s eyes and Dean watched them, staring deeply until they were no longer reflections, no longer the light of mutated flowers, they were stars. The light of stars that had died two thousand years ago shined in the blackness. They died, gave birth and the light would not reach the earth for a million more years. All these things happened precisely when they needed to happen, touching other things and branching out to touch yet other things, on and on continually. A pattern so intricate, so infinite, that it seemed completely random. That random dead star sent billions of particles traveling faster than the speed of light through the blackness and they mated with other particles, pieces of other dead stars, dust and bacteria spawned in the cosmos, and the particles grew and grew. They became planets and organisms, gasses, stones, raindrops, ideas. They became water and slime, then fish, birds, unimaginable things that crawled with stubborn, godlike pretension and determination from the abyss to give up their gills in favor of legs. They discovered fire, invented the wheel, built pantheons, built cities, created governments, created war, created gods, created love.

The light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not, Dean thought, not sure it was even his own thought because he could not remember ever thinking anything like “shineth” and he felt he was on the brink of understanding something important, something crucial. For just an instant, a blink, the space of time between one tear and the next, the single beat of a hummingbird’s wings, he saw the devil from the outside, through other, more loving eyes. Even God did not understand the nature of him, he had said, how could something so small and meaningless as a man, as a hero, as a monkey understand? Lucifer who did not even understand himself and how even he—especially he—was so vital to that random-seeming pattern. Dean was given to understand far more than he saw and knew that he would not remember any of it if the devil kept his promise. He would not remember Lucifer, kneeling before the only creature in all of existence in all possible worlds whom he had ever loved. He would not remember the tragedy of that minute, suspended before the dawn of time, felt rather than observed, when Lucifer consented to become Satan, the adversary of mankind, to be hated and reviled forever and test men to the end of their faith and the last fiber of their beings. Because God had asked it.

My burden is light, Lucifer whispered to Dean in his mind and that was the very essence of it, the crux of the matter, wasn’t it? It all fit the pattern, that hard to see pattern, and Fate was not like a punch so much as a tidal wave but it did, oh it did punch holes in them all. He knew it and Lucifer let him know it. Dean didn’t know why and he would never know why. He felt such pity, such remorse for Lucifer, such regret; regret like the hollow clang of a bell at the bottom of a well. A bell which for all the world could not be unrung. It could change him to know that thing and he wanted to hold onto that, just that one brief spark of understanding and chaotic empathy, even in the depths of his promised paradise beyond the world, wrapped up in Lucifer’s mind with Sam, he wanted to keep that. Let me keep it, please, God, don’t give it just to take that too. Just that one part, let me have it, he wanted to beg but he wasn’t sure he said it or if Lucifer heard it at all or even if he cared, but he was soon swallowed by the sky in Satan’s eyes.

It was the last lucid thought he had for a long time.

Dean opened his eyes and experienced a moment of vertigo as he stared up at the stars over his head. So many tiny pinpricks of light that it made his eyes try to cross. For a few moments he thought he was lying on his back in the grass then he realized there was cool metal against his skin where his shirt had rucked up around his waist. The hood of the Impala was still warm from the engine and the heat of the day spent on the road. He tried to remember the day and he couldn’t. At first that bothered him as he searched his mind, trying to remember where they had been, what they had done, coming up blank everywhere he turned. Then he realized there was a strange lightness to his thoughts. A lightness he hadn’t expected to find and Dean—who had never been great at just accepting good things when they came to him—stopped trying to remember.

Dean cocked his head to one side to look down the glossy hood to where Sam was sitting with the heels of his boots on the bumper, his elbows on his knees as he stared out at the horizon which was just barely distinguishable by moonlight. There was a small hole in the back of Sam’s shirt close to his spine and Dean put a hand out to touch it. He grazed his fingertips over the rough torn cotton then playfully wiggled his finger inside, making Sam twitch and look at him over his shoulder.

“You were sleeping when I woke up,” Sam said. He frowned at Dean then turned and crawled up to lay on the hood of the car beside him. “I woke up in the back seat, but I don’t remember how we got here.”

“Where’s here?” Dean asked. His voice broke like he’d been sleeping for a week straight. When he looked at Sam, for just an instant he expected his eyes to shine in the dark. They didn’t shine and in the shadows cast by his features, Dean couldn’t even see them. They were remarkably devoid of stars.

“Exactly,” Sam said. “Where are we? And how the hell did we get here?”

Dean stared at him, hungry for the sight of him, and put out a hand to brush a lock of his girly long hair out of his face. “I don’t know,” he said. “Come here.”

Sam didn’t move for a moment then he sighed and though he couldn’t see it, Dean could imagine him rolling his eyes. He was being tolerant, putting on a show of long-suffering endurance, but Dean knew he liked it. He grinned and sat up, catching Sam’s mouth in a deep, urgent kiss as he overbalanced them off the hood of the car. Sam caught himself on the side of the Impala and Dean pressed himself against him, his hands pulling at his clothes.

“Jesus, Dean, hold on,” Sam said, holding him off as he panted. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing,” Dean said and he laughed when he realized it was true. He wanted to touch because it felt like eons since the last time and he knew Sam wouldn’t deny him. It felt like snatching love from the jaws of death, though he couldn’t have said why if he were asked. “Nothing’s wrong, Sammy. Nothing.”

“Yeah?” Sam said. “I feel weird. You don’t feel weird?”

“I feel awesome,” Dean said.

“Something’s wrong,” Sam said uncertainly. He rubbed at his temple and frowned. “Something… and I can’t think.”

Dean pressed himself against his brother and held his face cupped in his hands, watching him closely, almost expecting a change as he leaned in and kissed him. “Forget it,” he murmured. “It’ll look better in the morning.”

“Sleep on it?” Sam asked, lightly teasing him.

“Oh yeah,” Dean said. He smiled and slid his hands under Sam’s shirt. “Except I wasn’t really thinking about sleep. You tired?”

“No,” Sam said. Confused but willing, he returned Dean’s smile and leaned in to kiss him back. “I feel like Rip van Winkle. Like I’ve been asleep for a hundred years.”