Work Text:
Into the Abyss
Sam doesn't really remember the Cage.
He doesn't remember being taunted, or tortured, or beaten; he doesn't even really remember seeing Lucifer or Michael or Adam as actual separate entities; doesn't remember their voices or their actions. He spent two hundred years on an ethereal plane where time and reality loops upon itself endlessly—where decades pass between one blink and the next; where you are simultaneously broken down and rebuilt until you can't tell the difference between the two. It isn't something his conscious mind can grasp, not completely.
Sometimes Sam finds it amusing that the sheer magnitude of his trauma is the only thing that's keeping him from imploding.
But when everything is quiet and Lucifer is humming something that's familiar enough to be a lullaby, Sam hears the clink of chains, wet coughs and screaming; feels searing heat and pain like a tightening vise around his head; sees, from the corner of his eye, mangled corpses hanging from meat hooks—and each of these pathetic formless things bears his face, looking at him with sightless eyes. It's only a second—he can barely remember details, only the sensations—but he's shaking at the end of it, choking on his brother's name. But Dean isn't there, it's Lucifer—hands against his face, warm and calloused, saying it's okay, sammy like he hasn't heard-felt-heard in a long, long while.
The Cage isn't his past; it isn't a memory to be locked away and called upon on will. It isn't an entity lurking in his brain, bleeding through the cracks in his mind and dripping into reality.
It is his reality. It shapes the way he lives; it is what drives him to Lucifer (because he understands, doesn't he? he does); it is what makes him consider his brother, look at him drowning in alcohol and grief and a terrible, familiar rage, and makes him think i can't do this to him. how do i help him? how do i lessen his burden?
In between confessions and reassurances, Lucifer offers the key to a beautiful kind of madness—it's in you, sam, he says. you don't need me, or dean, or anybody else to know that you're more than capable of destroying every enemy that comes your brother's way. He smiles, and it is a slow, terrible smile, and Sam finds himself mirroring it perfectly. you are the man that destroyed himself to save the world. guess what? it needs saving again.
Sam knows this road—he's travelled it before, seen it to its bitter end. Ruby promised him great things as well (you are special, sam. you are the only one)—saving the world, averting the Apocalypse; reaping glorious retribution for four months (two years) of unendurable agony, for every second of those forty years that Dean suffered in Hell. Sam walked that road and reaped only disaster.
How is it any different now?
It doesn't matter if he chooses to jump or lets go of a precarious hold on crumbling rock—the descent is the same. The sole reason remains the same.
Dean.
Sam doesn't know what will happen once he opens the door that Lucifer offers him the key to. He only knows that it's something that he's hurtling toward anyway. If, by opening it sooner, he can help the world (help his brother), then it will all have been worth it.
So Sam trains—he can move objects after the first two weeks, can orient their direction and velocity in the next, and within two months, he has learned how to turn anything around him into a deadly weapon. He tries mind-exorcisms; tries to imagine the demonic smoke as black ooze that he's literally tearing out of the body of the host. Sometimes, when he's relaxed and lazy, he daydreams of reopening the door to Purgatory everywhere and sending the Leviathan back to where they came from.
Lucifer is proud, always proud. He sits with Sam through the migraines that result from the first couple of weeks of intense practice; his presence is an anchor, and when he hums his strange lullaby, Sam finds himself drifting into a dreamless sleep.
Dean is starting to get worried for him, Sam can tell—he can't always hide the debilitating headaches and the nosebleeds, after all. Sam doesn't tell him he's fine—they've come a little too far for that—but there is nothing Dean can do, because it's an impossible situation with no solutions except for the one terrible one that Sam can't bear telling his brother just yet.
(just not yet)
The door opens just a little more, and the Cage begins to blend seamlessly into reality. Sam can turn from ordering a cup of coffee to a meathook stabbing into his chest (muscle cramps, he mutters to the alarmed onlookers from where he's lying on the ground); from cleaning the guns to having his arms set on fire and back again without missing a beat. Once his tongue gets cut out of his mouth and he can't talk for nearly an hour.
Sam doesn't really care. Dean does, and everyday Dean looks at him like he's a broken thing but doesn't do anything because he simply doesn't have the energy to spare. Sam understands, and doesn't begrudge him even the slightest.
(how delightfully selfish of you, sammy, Lucifer tells him once, smiling)
So Sam trains to the sound of Lucifer's music, Dean both burns and rots in his own grief and need for vengeance, and the door—
The door opens further and further.
Finis