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Once, soon after Castiel—soon after the hallucinations stop—Dean asks Sam about the Cage. Well, he doesn’t ask. He tries to indicate that he’s there if Sam ever needs to talk about it. It’s an awkward moment and both of them know it’s never going to happen. They have more important things to deal with.
Sam, anyway, can’t tell Dean. Dean’s been through Hell, been broken in Hell, and he came back from it—Sam knows he’s lying if he says Dean’s fine, but Dean never had hallucinations, never fell so far he had to be locked up in a mental ward. Dean must think that what Sam suffered was a thousand times worse, and Sam can’t admit that it wasn’t fire, or pain, or Lucifer’s personal abuse that broke him, instead, it was—
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Nothing. The Cage is empty. It takes Sam some time to realize that this is, in fact, the Cage, that he didn’t just lose himself while falling, because he knows what Hell is like, knows the Cage is at the center, knows there should be—but those are all tortures designed for humans. The Cage was built for an archangel. What better punishment for a near-omniscient celestial being than complete sensory deprivation?
But it shouldn’t just be him. He tries calling for Lucifer, Adam, even Michael, but there’s no sound in the Cage, and no vision—Lucifer could be standing right in front of him, if standing’s the right word in such a place—and he wouldn’t ever know.
Time passes. Sam remembers trying to sleep in the passenger seat of the Impala, that sensation of closing his eyes, feeling sure it’s been at least an hour, then opening them and looking at the clock to find that only five minutes have passed. There are no clocks here. It might have been five minutes, five hours, or five weeks. He’s not sure it hasn’t been five years.
Sam thought he was prepared for this. He was prepared for an eternity of torture—he deserved that; he’d been the one to set Lucifer free in the first place, so it was only right he pay the price. And even neverending pain would be, in a sense, final. But with the neverending nothingness there's an impatience, a sense that there has to be something else, because there has to be something.
He tries to distract himself. He thinks about Dean, happy in his life with Lisa. He doesn’t think about Bobby, or Castiel, or Ellen and Jo, the ones they lost (doesn’t think about them—right). He thinks about the civilians, all the innocent people out in the world who never knew how close it came to ending. He wonders if it was worth it.
No, no, he can’t wonder that; he’s been alone with his thoughts long enough to know that he can’t put them back in the box, that if he asks himself this now he’ll be asking it for the rest of—ever. If Sam’s going to be imprisoned for eternity it’s going to be knowing he made the right choice.
But still—was it worth it?
He couldn’t ask himself that. But Sam wasn’t the one asking, was he? This was Lucifer, doing what he’d always done, still trying to convince Sam he was in the right, and all those billions of lives you saved? When they’re dead, you’ll still be here, and when their children’s children’s children are dead, you’ll still be here, and you’re really gonna try to say you don’t wonder if it was worth it?
Sam was conscious, occasionally, that of course it wasn’t really Lucifer, that this was a mental trick, because if he had to spend eternity questioning, then debate was preferable to self-doubt by far, but—well, it wasn’t like Lucifer wasn’t locked up in here too, somewhere—why wouldn’t it really be him?
Oh, but you’re good at lying to yourself, aren’t you? It’s really kind of sad.
“What’s sad?”
You, Sam. You know you deserve the worst tortures I could dream up for you but then, when it came down to it, you couldn’t take it. So you shut it out. Made this up instead. You tell yourself that you think an eternity of torture would be better than this …
Sam doesn’t reply.
You’re good at lying to yourself, Lucifer repeats.
Eventually (because eventually is the only measure of time that’s left to him) Sam gives in. “You think I can’t take the punishment I deserve?” he asks. “Try me.”
Lucifer wears Sam’s form, still, as he tortures him. Sam has to wonder if that means something.
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That’s what Sam won’t ever tell Dean. He’d done it to himself. It was always just him.