Room for One
There was an uncertain flicker before the bathroom light fully revealed Sam Winchester before the tarnished mirror hanging over the pepto pink sink that was now peppered with scarlet dewdrops. His raw, red hands stung under the ice cold water that shot out in brownish spurts, but it was nothing compared to the theatrical voice cascading through the bathroom doorway.
"What hath night to do with sleep?!"
What, indeed. Sam drew himself out of a daze, and caught himself staring blankly at the mirror to realize a smile had snuck across his lips while he wasn't paying attention. Brushing it off as he shook his hands dry (one shake, two shakes makes two) a blonde head poked itself inside the matching pepto painted doorway to the bathroom.
"My normal voice has a far better range than this one," Lucifer wrinkled his nose in dissatisfaction before whipping his head back out of view to tromp about the motel room with one of Sam's books in hand, quoting aloud and quite overdramatically at that.
Hands still raw, the skin already tight from healing, Sam flexed them as he ambled over to the doorway to lean on the frame and watch Lucifer's free mummers show. What few books Sam carried with him (or picked up at rummage sales to be exchanged for others once he read them because let's face it, when was the last time a Winchester really had any belongings?) littered the floor, their pages absorbing any number of unknown bacteria that manifested in the fiber forest that was the forgotten shag brown carpet that spanned the room in its entirety.
Lucifer stopped flipping the (play)book of his current performance and eyed Sam as if he were lowering invisible glasses down his nose.
"What, are you starting to enjoy this or something?" he asked, like a teacher asking a student if he was entirely sure he was in the right class, "What, am I entertaining you now?"
Sam couldn't help but laugh, shaking his head. Was he? Did he?
"I don't know, I-" he looked back at Lucifer whose expression had yet to change, looking at him expectantly with eyes like ice.
"It doesn't quite feel like I'm alone," Sam heard himself say softly, the words echoing in his ears as if he was merely listening to a recording of himself saying it, or someone pretending to be him.
"Oh, but you are alone!" Lucifer drawled, drawing nearer. He slipped behind Sam and into the shadows of the now unlit bathroom, his fingers curling and crawling over Sam's shoulders as he spoke, "Who knows what you have spoken to the darkness, alone, in the bitter watches of the night, when all your life seems to shrink, the walls of your bower closing in about you, a hutch to trammel some wild thing in?" Sam had to admit that this performance was by far Lucifer's best, though perhaps fitting for the father of all demons and darkness, and one of Lucifer's hands lightly crept up Sam's neck, "So fair, yet so cold like a morning of pale Spring still clinging to Winter's chill."
Lucifer's cold fingers closed around Sam's neck, holding him firmly but not squeezing, and Sam could sense a wicked grin take hold of the face leering at him from over his shoulder. His lips briefly, gently brushed Sam's ear, he smiled again, and Sam trembled as he felt Lucifer's breath on his face.
Just as quickly as it happened, Lucifer released him and swept back across the room, now pacing in the yellow light from the single bedside lamp by the misshapen queen-sized bed. Sam's still-healing hand reached to massage his throat, his own fingers far warmer than the ones previously there, yet part of him wanted those other fingers back. He absentmindedly massaged his tense muscles as his mind reflected on Lucifer's words, that wormtongued demon. Sam never spoke anything to the darkness, and if he did it was mutely in his head beside his slumbering brother in some other musty hotel room on many a night when he couldn't find sleep. Sleep still didn't come to Sam any more easily, but what he might have spoken to the darkness was instead speaking it aloud at him at all hours of the day. And by the Prince of Night, no less.
Sam was hiding another smile as Lucifer eyed him, brows furrowed, his hand at his lips in thought.
"I still don't quite buy it, Sammy," he said, finally, his theatrical mood still not having quite worn off.
Well, of course you don't, because I don't even buy it myself, Sam thought as his lips unfurled in a contemplative frown. His smiles were troubling him, and Lucifer knew that, but what made them trouble him would always be an issue, and what sane part of Sam knew this was some Stockholm coping mechanism at work… though did that completely eclipse what comfort he felt in Lucifer's icy grip? Or his breath on his skin? What the night held for him was becoming more and more enticing than any hunting and yielded more ease than he would have ever imagined. Can ease make one feel uneasy? Sam thought as he watched Lucifer continue to pace, Because sometimes this is almost… nice.
Sam shifted uncomfortably at the thought, and looked down at his pinked hands, turning them over as if some answer were written in his scars. And it was, sort of. Though Sam was physically alone; he never let Lucifer get in the way of his work, despite how much he blabbered and how much Sam had to fight to ignore taunts and tantrums in the line of seeing eyes. Sam always got a room for one, though it really was a room for two, and while hearing Lucifer torment him constantly may have been uncomfortable, the physicality was something that was becoming a little more comfortable in such close quarters. And that was something Sam hadn't felt since…
"Wait." Lucifer said, shaking Sam from his reverie. Sam watched as he crossed the room to his knapsack (always rummaging through my things and never putting anything back…) to return with a single sharpie in hand, looking quite pleased with himself (which, for Lucifer, was quite often).
"What are you doing," Sam asked, so confused and so deadpan that a question mark would have hardly been appropriate to even insinuate with enunciation.
Lucifer merely glanced at Sam in response as he unbuttoned the top few buttons of his shirt and shouldered passed Sam into the bathroom.
"Don't turn around." Lucifer ordered huskily just as Sam was about to. There was something in his voice that Sam hadn't heard in all his time with him. A tinge of, bitterness? No, Lucifer had absolutely been bitter, but bitter was somewhere on the right track. Jealousy? Not quite…
Lucifer coughed pointedly and Sam finally turned around.
Lucifer had drawn an inverted and mirrored version of Sam's anti-possession tattoo, the one he shared with Dean. Lucifer's expression was blank under his close cropped blonde hair, but it betrayed him. In his usual snide way he taunted Sam and everything he stood for; of course Lucifer couldn't be possessed, the nameless blonde was already marked for the lovely life of a secondary vessel the moment Sam was no longer an option. So what are you trying to tell me?
"You know you can't get rid of me Sam," he said, his voice hardly a whisper, "And I can't quite get rid of you. So that makes us brothers in a way, doesn't it Sammy boy?"
Sam's mind was void of response and his tongue remained motionless, his voice silent. At a loss for words and taken aback by this definition for their dark camaraderie, Sam averted his eyes from the crude marking on Lucifer's bare chest to see the book Lucifer had been reading from. Paradise Lost sat haphazard, pages first in the pepto pink sink, the paper soaking up what was left of Sam's blood.
Lucifer walked over to Sam and patted him, hard, on the shoulder, his icy fingers gripping his shoulder in a vice on the last pat, before he vanished into the other room again, leaving Sam to the darkness.
Sam didn't move, but he watched Lucifer lower himself onto the bed and begin to leaf through Two Towers again, his new self-made mark gleaming, ink still wet, in the dingy light of the bedside lamp. Paradise Lost remained in the shadowed sink, and Sam reckoned it would stay there. Lucifer had abandoned his brothers (or had they abandoned him?) and now lacked a brother to torment and torture in the night. It was a feeling a little too familiar to Sam, and he wondered how it was his lot to land the devil on his shoulder and Dean with the angel on his.
But Lucifer was his, Sam belonged to Lucifer. That was forged in blood. Could Dean say that about Cas? Keep your enemies closer, Sam crossed his arms over his chest as he resumed leaning in the doorway, maybe too close for comfort. Lucifer saw him, eyeing him over the edge of his book, and beckoned him, a free hand patting the space on the bed beside him.
With limbs like lead, Sam made his way over to the bed, turned out the light and crawled under the sheets. Lucifer was gone. The book lay abandoned next to him, the pillow cold.
But Sam was not alone tonight in this room for one, he never was. His soul had room for two, and though unseen, the darkness would never stop speaking to him in the long night that never ended, and Sam was afraid to admit that he was getting used to it.
Lying on his back, Sam's hand felt the coolness of the pillow next to him, reaching for a phantom who wasn't there but was always with him. Always.