A/N: Rewatching Season 7 and felt the need to delve into this pain.
Warning for violence/gore.
Sometimes, Lucifer brings him back to other realities, just to rub it in. Not real, not real. Most days, Sam's too tired to come up with a rebuttal, a return volley of arguments.
He never did become a lawyer, after all.
All the other realities suck, too. Sam's whole life is a patchwork of pain and fear and grime and blood. The things that made it good—Jess, school, those are faded like something wilted and dry.
The only thing that makes it good, here, now, the present—is Dean.
And he's the least real of all of this, Lucifer whispers giddily. It's his world, his carnival, and in all the dreadful memories, he changes the ending.
Dean dies at sixteen, shredded by the werewolf.
Dean dies at twenty-four, when Sam is buried in books at Stanford.
This is just as real as anything you see around you.
The blood in those worlds patterns its way onto Sam's hands, slick and sticky and still almost warm. Almost the blood of the living. Almost real.
Dean dies at twenty-eight, and Lucifer laughs the hardest then, because nothing hurts more than an ending Sam knows to be true.
I could split him open now, Lucifer offers, forked tongue darting out to twine around his overlong canines. Sam grinds his teeth until he fears they'll crack. Show you how real this little cotton-candy dream is.
.
It's a good day when his hands aren't shaking. It's a good day when he doesn't start out of sleeping with a gasp, fists clenched and eyes wide. It's—
Sam stops waiting for good days. Good hours, good moments. Those are easier to find.
"Sam."
"Sorry, what?" He feels guilty. It's clear that Dean's said his name at least three times already.
"If you can see past the clouds of alcohol, there's worry in his eyes," coos Lucifer, uncomfortably close to Sam's ear.
Sam bites down. Catches the edge of his tongue.
Blood tastes like salt and copper, but he knew that before Hell.
.
Sam doesn't know who to pray to.
God seems far, and Cas was God, and Sam no longer knows what he knows. If he is still in the Cage—and he won't say that out loud, won't give Lucifer the credit—then he cannot bear the irony trapped in iron.
If he isn't, it's his own damn problem to fix.
If you can hear me, he thinks, all the same, until Lucifer starts laughing.
"Begging? That's a neat trick. Roll over, Sam. Play dead."
.
"Could you…ignore him?"
Sam tries to keep his eyes on Dean, but Lucifer doesn't like when the attention is off him. He cuts capers, jigs, digs his fingers into Sam's eye-sockets. He'll do anything. Anything but leave.
"It's hard." Sam chokes it out, trying to ignore the arms wrapped around his throat. Not real, not real.
Dean chews his lips. This is Dean turning into Dad, Sam sees. The endless drinking. The pain etched into the fine lines around his eyes. Sam didn't know that's what it was, when he was a kid.
Sam understood pain, then, but not like this.
The Winchesters. They suffer, but they can always suffer more, and they do.
"You want something to eat?" Dean offers. Now he looks less like Dad and more like Dean again, and that's a relief. Dean has been feeding Sam and tucking Sam in and all of that forever. But Sam can't humor him this time, doesn't want to eat food that, at a snap of Lucifer's fingers, will be crawling with maggots or drenched in blood.
"I'm good," he says. And tries as hard as he's ever tried for anything to smile.
"What about good memories?" Dean straddles a chair, arms folded on the back, chin resting on his crossed wrists. "Does that help?"
"He just ruins them," Sam whispers. "But thanks."
Then Dean's face caves in. Sam shudders, jolts, while Lucifer examines the mess of blood and bone that used to be Dean's face.
Somehow, Dean keeps talking. "That son of a bitch."
"Right on," Lucifer chuckles, plucking out Dean's teeth.
"Sam? Sam?"
Sam shuts his eyes. It's all he can do, even though he sees fire. It's better than looking at—that.
And then he feels Dean's hand grasp his. If he opens his eyes, Dean will still be missing a face. But Lucifer hasn't yet found a way to ruin the comforting pressure of his brother's calloused fingers wrapped around Sam's, and so Sam just stays that way, eyes squeezed shut, teeth grinding together, until the next good moment comes.