I'm just looking back at this story after a year. Two days short of a year, really. Anyway, it's been a long time. The writing seems ok, so I'm just going to refresh the author's notes.

Warnings will all be here at the start. If I have to update them I'll note at the start of the new chapter that you should come back here and recheck the warnings. I'm not warning for canon typical things. PM me if something on the warning list is a problem for you and you want to see if you could read portions of the story and skip that bit. I'd be perfectly happy to write a brief description of what happens.

Sexual assault. Not full rape, just anal fingering.

Dub con. Does not include penetrative sex.

Sexual situations including someone crushing on their captor (not Stockholm Syndrome; the crush started before the captivity).

I didn't mean anything by it. It was just a prank. A trick. A joke! I'm the trickster, I should be able to trick people without it getting this serious. Maybe I went too far when I targeted the Winchesters. They had tried to kill me, but it was just their job. I liked Sam, right from the start. I think that's why I targeted him for the prank I'm currently working on.

Sam's mad at me. OK, I deserve some wrath. I did kill his brother- over a hundred times. But I always brought Dean back to life! It was just a silly prank! And then I killed Dean one last time and left him dead. So, Sam hates me and is hunting me. At first it was funny, just another joke. But I picked to prank Sam because he's so kind and gentle. I just like being around him.

And now Sam's changed, and I wish I didn't have to watch. I don't want to be around him anymore. Sam, the gentle, compassionate Sam Winchester, creeps me out to the point where I don't want to watch him. I wish I'd never started this prank. He was supposed to handle Dean's death. He was supposed to recover. But it's not happening.

Eventually I couldn't stand waiting anymore. I called Sam, pretending to be Bobby. I told him I'd found a way to catch the trickster, and he agreed to meet me. I had a pretend version of his friend Bobby waiting for him. I wanted to test Sam, to find out if he was truly as dark as he looked. He thoroughly scared me in two minutes of conversation, and he thought he was talking to his friend.

And then Sam was willing to kill Bobby. Bobby had been a father to him. And he stabbed the illusion with a bloody stake. If I'd really been a trickster and that had been me, it would've killed me. And it certainly would've killed Bobby. Sam had guessed that it wasn't really Bobby, but he hadn't been sure. And it was a risk he was willing to take.

That chilled me to the bone, and archangels don't get cold easily. I had to find a way to fix this. Sam wasn't supposed to behave like this. I let the illusion melt away and appeared before Sam. I summoned the stake, just so he wouldn't get any ideas. For a few moments, the conversation seemed to be going ok.

Sam broke off in the middle and started some Latin spell. It was some kind of revealing spell, about weapons or something. My Latin's rusty. And then I realized something scary. The spell had been tailored to affect archangels. This was bad. This was really bad.

I was too shocked to fly away like I should've. How had Sam found out who I was? That shouldn't've been possible. He couldn't know. Nobody was supposed to know! I wasn't paying attention, but I noticed when the spell forced my wings to do that visible shadow on the wall thing. If Sam had had any doubt about who I was, it was gone now.

I backed away from him. I was about to fly away, but then he was holding my own angel blade to my throat. I froze. "How'd you get that?" I asked, trying not to look scared.

Sam smirked, unimpressed. "Bring Dean back," he ordered, pressing the edge of the blade against my skin.

"Whoa, whoa," I gasped. "OK. Put the knife down, and I'll get your precious Dean-o back."

"You're lying," Sam said immediately. "That's what you promised last time."

"But-" I paused for a moment, trying to come up with a convincing argument. "I'll bring him back." OK, yeah, so that wasn't the most helpful thing to say. I don't think well when I'm feeling this threatened.

"I don't believe you," Sam said. He pushed forward with the blade and I took a step back. He pushed forward again, and I didn't realize what he was doing until he had me backed against a wall.

"Please," I begged, gasping. "It was just a stupid prank." I tried not to think about how easily this situation could end in my death. "I-if you kill me, your brother will stay dead. Just- just let me go, and I can bring you back to that Wednesday! It'll be like none of this ever happened. Please, Sam."

"What, so you can kill Dean again?" Sam asked angrily. "Not this time. I'm going to make sure you never hurt anyone ever again."

"Wait!" I pleaded. "D-don't kill me, please! You can't." Unfortunately, he could, and we both knew it. I didn't want to die. Sleeping forever in the empty sounded terrible. My eyes filled involuntarily with tears.

"Oh, I'm not going to kill you," Sam said. His eyes promised something worse. I didn't want to even think about what he could be talking about.

I shut my eyes against whatever he was planning, as though that could help anything. I didn't think through the fact that I was an archangel, or I could've just shoved him off me and flown away. I really need to work on not losing my head in a crisis.

Sam sliced the skin on my throat and collected my grace in a bottle. I freaked out and started struggling when I felt it start to leave, but by then it was too late. I was little more than human, and Sam was a lot stronger than me. I should've picked a taller vessel or exercised. Something.

The last of my grace left my body, and Sam let me go. I should've tried to run, but I didn't know what it would be like to lose my grace. I knew, theoretically, what it would mean, but experiencing it was a million times more horrible than I'd imagined.

I collapsed to the ground like a rag doll, overwhelmed by just existing on a near human level. Everything seemed so vivid and yet dull and confusing. I couldn't process what was going on at all. And I couldn't handle the wealth of information that was all mixed up with my suddenly much lower processing skills. It was just impossible. How did humans do this? I covered my ears with my hands and shut my eyes, desperately trying to make the whole thing stop.

Sam grabbed my wrists and tried to pull my hands away from my head. I tried to fight him, wildly, like a caged animal. I think I was yelling something, but I'm not sure what it was. I made a break for the door, but Sam punched me once in the back of the head. He knocked me unconscious.

…

I woke up in a room somewhere. I was lying on my stomach on a bed, and my hands were cuffed to the sides of the headboard. Normally, I wouldn't mind that position particularly. It's not like I haven't bottomed in a BDSM situation before, and it's not like handcuffs are Fifty Shades of Grey creepy or anything.

But normally I could break those handcuffs in a second if I wanted. And now I couldn't. It was an entirely different situation, because I didn't have any control. I'd never been so helpless. I pulled on the cuffs a little, but the edges were sharp and I hurt my wrists. I didn't seem to be getting anywhere, so I gave up. There was no point in deliberately injuring myself for no reason.

I tried to turn sideways to see what was in rest of the room, but I couldn't. The angle my arms were yanked up at made moving almost impossible, and I was weak. I was so confident in my power as an archangel that I hadn't worried about the atrophy in my vessel's muscles. And now not working out or doing anything physically taxing for thousands of years was catching up with me. I dropped my head down onto the pillow, struggling to hold back tears. This was just too much.

And then came the crowning indignity. I couldn't even hide my face in the pillow properly, because I needed to breathe. I got dizzy and had to lift my head up to where the air was. This was a nightmare. I'd never imagined having to breathe before.

I gave up on trying to hold back the tears and just sobbed helplessly. There was no point trying to be strong against my captor when I felt so weak. It wasn't going to work anyway. Sam might as well find out how much he'd hurt me. So I let myself cry for a while.

And then my legendary short attention span kicked in and I got bored with crying. I sniffled a little and choked back my remaining tears. Being basically human couldn't be that bad, right? And there had to be something interesting to do. I awkwardly wiped some of the snot and tears on my face onto the pillow, but it wasn't very effective. That was weird. I'd never had to think about cleaning my face after crying before.

This was the point where I wanted to sit up, but it wasn't exactly doable. I could probably kneel with my arms like this, but that wasn't what I wanted. It would look weird and leave me in a sexually vulnerable position I didn't want to be in. It was strange for me, being afraid of a sexual position like that. I just felt so fragile and weak that stuff that was usually a turn on was terrifying.

So that left me struggling to peer sideways around my arms and coax the blobs of color to form coherent shapes. Seeing was still hard for me without my grace. I'd lost so much. The bland colors just wouldn't put together a coherent picture. I couldn't figure out what anything was. I squinted at a purple blob and guessed it was an armchair, maybe with someone in it.

If that was a person though, it'd have to be someone very tall… Oh, no. Sam had been here watching me the entire time. He was like, six eight or something ghastly like that, so it could easily be him. I quickly looked away. Maybe he hadn't noticed I was awake or something. OK, so there was honestly no chance of that.

I hadn't been exactly quiet when I was crying earlier. I hid my face in the pillow, hoping he'd go away. And then I needed to breathe again. I didn't wanna lift my head. So what if I suffocated a little? At least Sam wouldn't- uh… what was the point of hiding my face in the pillow? Right, I was embarrassed. Better to suffer from dizziness than face Sam while embarrassed.

I felt like my head was spinning, even though I was lying still. My throat felt tight and burned. I lifted my head and gasped in air. The dizzy feeling faded pretty quickly, but I was still breathing heavily. This felt so awkward. Had I turned into a human preteen or something, instead of an adult? How was this so embarrassing?

Or could this be about that little crush I'd been harboring for Sam since the day I'd first seen him? It wasn't a big deal at the time. It just made me flaunt my created girls a little more and turn my head so Sam couldn't see me so easily whenever I felt nervous. Whatever this was was a big deal. Any possible romantic interest I'd had in him should've been vanquished when he captured me, not increased. Although there was the little, unimportant fact that he'd handcuffed me to a bed. It was certainly a suggestive choice.

"Don't choke yourself," Sam said. His tone was torn between anger and amusement. He always sounded angry lately.

"Not- used to- breathing," I panted.

He snorted. "Pathetic."

I flinched. What had I done to him? How did he get so twisted? He was from Lucifer's bloodline. Maybe going evil just reigned in him like it had in my fallen brother. My eyes filled with tears again at the thought.