Disclaimer: I do not pretend to own any of the characters mentioned in this story. It's Kripke's sandbox, I just play in it.
A/N: Takes place after episode 5x04.
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When Sam was seventeen he read Paradise Lost for his AP English class. Dean remembers him, scrunched up in the old, moth eaten arm chair of their apartment, or slouched in the passenger seat of the Impala, the worn, yellowed page paperback book in his hands, hair falling over his eyes as he fixed them on the tiny print. He'd tried to get Dean interested in it, holding the book out with one long, gangly arm, all awkward wrist and elbow and christ, still growing, and Dean had taken one look at the column of words and scoffed.
Looks like poetry to me, he'd said. All that sweater wearing, finger snapping touchy-feely crap. Not for me. Sam had rolled his eyes, pulled back the book.
Dean was twenty-one and it had been three years since he'd gotten his GED, and he was delighted that the only thing he ever had to read now was the newspapers for freak accidents and obituaries.
Still, he'd listen to Sam whenever he got excited about something he'd read, brows pulled down over earnest eyes and an excited tone to his voice that he only ever got when he talked about books, or school, or getting away. He'd listen, because Dad was more often than not on a hunt and they were holed up in a piece of shit one bedroom apartment with mold in the walls and no air conditioning, forty minutes away from Sam's high school and they only had each other to listen to.
Sam had been rambling on during the drive from school one day, talking about the fall of Eve and the parallels between her and the Greek myth of Narcissus, and Dean had just shook his head.
I don't get it, Sammy, he'd told him, ignoring the way Sam's eyes had narrowed at the nickname. It's the same old story. Eve bites the apple, gives it to Adam. Same beginning. Same ending. What's so fascinating about it?
That started Sam on a tangent about different point of views, and whether or not Adam and Eve were fallen before they sinned and predestination and what lead to each character's fall and Dean pretty much blocked it all out until Sam got to the part about the devil being the main character.
What?
Sam flipped through the book in his hands. Yeah, Lucifer's actually a pretty sympathetic character in this one. Cast out of heaven for raging against a tyrannical God, and the whole thing Garden of Eden scene is shown through his eyes. Make sense if you think, because Milton himself was an officer of the Commonwealth of England, and hated the monarchy. So I think he sympathized with rebels. He paused, flipped through the book some more. Actually, one interpretation is that Lucifer is the hero of the poem.
Dean raised his eyebrows at him, because after all they've seen and fought he couldn't imagine Sam ever saying something like the devil, as mythical as he was, could be a hero.
Sam had just shrugged. It's just interesting. A different way of thinking about things. Then he'd gone back to reading.
Now, Dean splashes cold water on his face in the bathroom of a musty hotel room, trying to get the image of his brother, all in white, one foot over his future self's neck, out of his mind. He tries not to remember the confident way Lucifer had moved around in Sam's body, the way he'd delicately pressed his fingers to the rose, tries to overcome the disgust and hatred and sorrow that roils through every time he thinks about that thing wearing his brother's body as easily as he did that white suit.
He tries to forget Lucifer's expressions on his brother's face: the small, calm smile on his lips, the lack of a crease between his eyebrows, the untroubled eyes. He'd looked…serene, almost.
And certain.
It's been three days since he met back up with Sam, and he still finds himself watching his brother, looking for tale-tell signs of that serenity, that certainty, even though he knows they wouldn't be there, but unable to get the image out of his mind.
The devil who wore his brother's face, and a smile.
Dean sighs, wipes his face off with a towel and steps out of the bathroom. Sam is getting dressed by the bed furthest from the door, digging into his duffel bag for a clean shirt. Neither of them have done laundry in a while and he has to reach down to the bottom, pulling out a shirt he's worn only a few times.
It's a clean white button up, and it's bright against the mud brown of the bedspread, not yet dingy from use and being thrown in the wash with dark jeans and t-shirts. Dean stops in his tracks and watches Sam slip it over his shoulders, feels something twist and clench in the pit of his stomach at the contrast between the white fabric and his brother's skin.
"Don't wear that one," he says abruptly. And Sam stops, looks at Dean in confusion. "Here." Dean goes to his own duffel, pulls out his baggiest button up and shoves it at Sam's chest. Sam barely grabs it before Dean is pulling at the other shirt, practically ripping it off his brother's arms before shoving it back in the duffel, out of sight.
"Dean--what?" Sam asks, completely bewildered. His hands are tangled in the dull green fabric of the shirt Dean forced on him.
"White's not your color," he says gruffly, and walks back to his own duffel. He doesn't say anything else, and neither does Sam. As he packs his bag he wonders if Sam was right, all those years ago, if Adam and Eve really were damned even before the sin. He watches his brother pull on the shirt out of the corner of his eye. Sam's eyebrows are furrowed, the crease between them prominent, and his whole expression is tight with confusion and uncertainty.
Dean breathes a sigh of relief.