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Sometimes Sam thought the cold was the worst thing about the Cage, or the lack of privacy. Sometimes it was the unnerving way the prison dangled in the empty air, suspended by thin chains over an endless abyss.
Rarely did Sam's companions even make the shortlist of his worst problems.
There was a miasma, in the cage, a general, oppressive aura of hopelessness. It made it difficult for any of them to even move, let alone torture each other. The four of them were trapped in the torments constructed for them by their own minds.
Adam's body had long since disintegrated, unable to withstand the pressure of holding Michael, not to mention the proximity to Lucifer in his true form, once Sam's body had disappeared. None of them knew what had happened to Sam's body. The mystery, the excitement, had actually stirred Lucifer out of the gloom for a few days.
Sometimes the ever-present lightning storm around them worsened, or they got unlucky, and a bolt struck the cage. Sam wasn't sure the archangels even noticed when that happened, but he and Adam sure as hell did.
Looking at Lucifer wasn't too bad, actually. He was bright, and Sam couldn't really see anything except white light, but Sam could look straight at him and not react more than involuntarily blinking a few times. Michael, though, was another matter. Sam could make out the edges, the ends of Michael's light, from the corners of his eyes, but nothing more. Sometimes Sam forgot and looked at Michael's corner directly (it was easier to do than one would think, to turn his head in the wrong direction, even after weeks and months and years of knowing better), and the pain made his head explode, his face burn. He always woke again after a few hours, or what he thought were hours. It was getting hard to remember what time was without any objectiv way to measure it.
Usually, the sense of timelessness, of eternity slipping away, was what Sam hated the most.
The day Michael started singing, Lucifer lost it.
Sam had never seen him like that, not angry but... panicked, afraid. He yelled in Michael's face, screamed at him for hours, trying to wake him up. Eventually he resorted to tricks. Firecrackers in his ear, his own (intentionally poor) singing to drown out Michael's, fires scorching and chill blistering the elder archangel in turns. Nothing worked, and Lucifer's frustration, his fear, spilled out onto the Cage's other residents. Sam, especially, through their bond. Lucifer tried beating Adam once, to stir Michael into action, but Michael didn't even blink. The unfortunate human was quickly abandoned again.
After a while, Lucifer's desperate attempts to reach Michael subsided into laughter, endless, maniacal giggling that Sam never learned to ignore, and that was when Sam was certain Lucifer was losing himself to the Cage, too.
Sam, meanwhile, was losing his mind as surely as the two archangels. Lucifer's emotions, projected through their bond, or through the strange, bleeding atmosphere of Hell, were too much, too strong for the human in his vulnerable, soul state, without the body he needed to filter them. They drove Sam as mad as any of the Cage's other residents.
By the time Sam was released, he didn't know which memory was which, what was his, what was Lucifer's, what was Michael's or what was Adam's. There was too much, too many alien thoughts and feelings and experiences, and Sam's human brain couldn't take it.
Sometimes, when Sam was trying to sleep at night, before the hallucination appeared, he could hear quiet, childish singing, and he couldn't remember why it sounded so dreadful.