Episode Eight
"Sanguis Sanctus, part II"
Chapter One

Thirteen Days Earlier

Sam frowned at the possessed Mr. Gill, looked around. He couldn't just kill the guy, not in broad daylight, and he wasn't that interested in whatever lie the demon was peddling. He didn't really have time to mess around with this guy before the innocent grieving civilian came out of the house to join him for lunch.

"Exorcizamus te-"

He'd expected the demon to smoke out, leave Mr. Gill and Sam could just go on his way, annoyed. But Mr. Gill just grinned. "Not a demon. Sorry."

"Shapeshifter."

Mr. Gill tilted his head, shrugged. "In a manner of speaking."

A few yards down, someone mowed their lawn. Up a street, a bunch of kids played in a sideyard pool. The sun beat down on them, bright colors, smell of someone's garden, cut grass, chlorine, sunscreen. Mr. Gill looked around them, sighed. "I know. I know how much you want to rip my heart out. But that's going to change."

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah. When you come with me."

Sam frowned. The shapeshifter was a bit round around the middle, he wasn't jumping that hedge any time soon, and he definitely wasn't outrunning Sam.

"I know what you're thinking. But I know something you don't know, Sam Winchester."

"What's that?"

"I'm not alone."

Sam felt the sting before he had quite connected the dots - a tranq, and he was going down. And around him "Mr. Gill" was calling for help saying Sam had just passed out suddenly, and a minivan with a soccer mom in it - but no kids - stopped and they waved onlookers off with talk about how they'd take him to the hospital and of course, of course, there was no case here, there was no case here, there was only a trap, a trap for the kind of person who would investigate these murders like they were something unnatural. A trap for hunters.

A trap for Winchesters.

He awoke slow. Tested his joints, his freedoms, without moving enough to alert anyone. Just like Dad had taught them, a habit that had kept them safe over and over, a habit he'd never tried to buck, not since Stanford, not even with Amelia. He was strapped down at his wrists and ankles. He was on a cot, mattress thick under his probing fingertips, a pillow for his head, cloth between his skin and his bindings, a blanket over him. His head pounded, his chest ached.

There were sounds, people. They didn't sound like they were going away. So he opened his eyes to slits. The light in the room was too bright.

"Turn down the lights," someone hissed, and the glare vanished. The shadow of a person beside him turned back to him. "You're okay. You're okay. Probably got a killer headache, don't you. I have some asprin here, some water."

Sam pressed his lips together and watched her, angry and feeling slow.

"Constance, come away," said another woman. Her voice was familiar. She walked into his field of vision and he frowned at the woman in red. Natalie.

"You."

"Shh." She sat in a chair next to the cot and folded a napkin in her lap, stained red, Sam recognized it as the handkerchief she'd used to dab the blood from his neck when they met two days earlier.

"You semmeup." Sam blinked slow. Felt slow. She'd drugged him.

"I didn't want to have to do it this way. I wanted to talk to you that night, but you were so distant, and then your brother showed up-"

"What'd'you wan'?" He blinked hard. Willed himself to stay awake. He had to find out what she wanted. Had to figure out how to warn Dean off.

"Oh Sam..."

Her voice faded, his eyelids were so heavy, his head pounded.

He woke again sometime later. Slow. The room was dark. Dean? God, his head. He tested his hands, feet, freedom, found himself bound and he was alone and it came back to him, that he was trapped, a struggling animal and he had to escape-

"Don't fight." The figure stood in the doorway of the room, in the dark. When it stepped into the room, Sam frowned. The bad boyfriend. Of course. Partners in crime.

"Not going to say anything, Sam Winchester? The Boy King."

Sam stared, cold. "That was a long time ago," Sam said. "And it never happened."

"Yes it did. For a couple of glorious days, he was on the throne." The bad boyfriend strolled around the room. "Did you know we were his favorite pets? Did you know he kept us and named us-"

"You specifically? No, he didn't mention." From the corner of his eye, Lucifer winked at him, appreciated his sarcasm. Awesome. The bad boyfriend whirled on Sam, then stalked a circle around him.

"All of us," the thing said. "Demons, he hated. Humans? Pathetic. But us? We were his favorites."

"Ahh, that. Yes, I do remember something about that." Sam shook his head, faux sympathy. "If only you knew what he was thinking that whole time. How disgusted he was by you, how he couldn't wait to set you on one another for his entertainment."

"You're lying."

Sam shrugged. It probably wouldn't be good to get him too angry, but he just couldn't help himself. Running his mouth like Dean would have done. Oh be fair, Sammy, you were a smartass from day one.

"You're lying-!" it said and was suddenly on him, clawing into his chest. Whoops.

"Frederick."

Sam's strangled cry echoed into nothing as the silence settled. Frederick stalked off back to the doorway, and Natalie strode toward Sam. She wasn't human, obviously. Sam couldn't tell what she was. She stroked up his leg with a manicured fingertip, stopped at his waist and laid her hand on his stomach. Her hand was hot through the fabric of his shirt, hotter than human: Fenix? Firewallow? Mother-of-lace? None of them were hard to kill - well, maybe the fenix, if you didn't have a copper-plated weapon laying around, and if you didn't know how to do the spell that turned them back into a fox, and if you didn't know to cut off the tail and burn it in copper sulfide and sea salt. But Dean knew all that. Probably.

"What do you want," he said.

"Feeling better, I see?"

"Answer the question."

She looked down at him, smiled a little. "We got what we want."

Sam knitted his brows. "Dean won't fall for this-"

"Oh, honey," she said, and she had a kind of southern drawl. Northern Mississippi? Fenix for sure, then. Juuuust great. "This isn't a trap."

"Whatever it is, I won't do it."

"You won't have a choice."

You always have a choice, Sam. Sam closed his eyes to get himself under control. The cold was always seething just under the surface, and in it swam Lucifer, waiting in the wings, yearning to be unleashed for even a moment, to have control, to bathe in the blood and make Sam watch- Sam exhaled and opened his eyes and stared at her. Even if it's only to choose what you let it do to you. "My brother's gonna kill you."

"Your brother has no idea where you are, and he's not coming for you. He's not even looking, not after the great talk we just had."

Sam frowned. "What?"

"Honey, you'll be lucky if he tries to call you ever again. I don't even suppose he'll pour out a whiskey on your grave once a year." She leaned in. "But it's better to be hated, isn't it? He won't be all torn up with grief when he realizes you're gone for good. He won't waste his life looking for you. He'll be happy to be rid of you." She blinked at him and raised her brows. "Oh yes, I've been inside that head of his. That boy can't wait for you to go and stay gone. He's been watching your ass for what, thirty years now? That year he spent away while you were with grandpappy, that was the best year of his life. He misses Purgatory when the alternative is you."

Sam stared. That wasn't true. It wasn't.

She smiled at him kindly. "The point is, he won't miss you. It won't hurt. I know you care about that. I know it would kill you if you thought he was pining, if you thought he was killing himself to retrieve you. So I took care of it. Reminded him of certain things. See, I want you to be as healthy and happy as you can be. I want you to live a long, long life here with us."

Sam watched her. She was lying; creatures lie. About Dean leaving him there to rot. She probably wasn't lying about what she said to Dean, no. If she was a fenix, and it was pretty likely if she was talking about Purgatory and stuff, Dean would never have talked about it voluntarily, she - god she'd kissed him at the police station, that had to have been her in. She could read him, she could read Dean that way. That was what a fenix did, got into the heads of the people closest to their victims, ensure they'd fit seemlessly into the hole their victim left.

And god, the crap she could dig up to rile Dean all over again. The guy never gave anything up, he just decided not to worry about it anymore. All it ever took was one misplaced look or word or whatever, and Dean was ready to fight about it all over again. She could figure out what upset Dean the most and just push on it.

But but, she could only skim Dean, she couldn't do that much damage. There was nothing she could say that could have made Dean hate him more than he had after Sam had sprung Lucifer, and Dean stayed then. Kinda. Basically. When Sam still didn't answer his phone after like three days, Dean would figure something was wrong, or at least try to find him to make Sam apologize or something. She was lying to get him to comply, she was lying about Dean leaving him to rot.

Right?

"So what do you want?" he said.

She tsked. "I already said. You. You, Sammy. This was all for you."

"I don't get it. You don't want to kill me, you don't want to use me to get to Dean." She just watched him, waiting. Tempting him to figure it out on his own. "So it's... something you want from me. Me specifically." She smiled slow, greedy. Well, there were lots of things destiny had marked him for - none of them good. But Lucifer was in a cage, and yellow eyes was dead. His visions had only ever been about his family or other psychic kids, and they stopped when Yellow Eyes bit it. The Trials were pretty much impossible for him to complete and they made him less of a threat than a baby with a bible. He wasn't useful to some baddie, he wasn't even in play anymore.

He shook his head. "I got nothin'. All the special in me is gone, lady."

She licked her lips. "You got special in you," she purred. "Well. You will."

Sam knitted his brows. That didn't sound good.

She smiled at him, turned and gestured, and Frederick was back. "Gently, now," she said, stepping back and out of Frederick's way.

Frederick sat on the side of Sam's cot, gripped him at the jawline. "Come on," he said, voice low.

Sam glared, wrenched his face out of the thing's grip.

"Come on. I got a treat for you." Frederick produced a vial, dark red, thick, and when he popped the cap off the tube, the sulfur tingled on Sam's tongue, prickled at the back of this throat. His breathing hitched, eyes wide, but he was over this, over this, he was never giving in again. Frederick grasped at his jaw again and Sam pinned his lips closed, bit down hard on the inside of them and tasted his own blood, glared even as his vision lost focus, and even when Frederick dug his clawed fingers into Sam's injured shoulder joint, when his hips lifted in agony as his back arched, he kept his mouth shut tight.

He had managed Lucifer. This thing would not break him.

"Enough, Frederick," the woman said. "Take his blanket, no water until this time tomorrow." She came up to Sam as Frederick cleared away the supplies. Her fingers were hot, hotter than human on his clammy cheek. "Please, my King. We would make you so powerful. Tomorrow, do not fight."

The night passed. Hours away from the stash in his bag. His chest was so heavy, his head ached beyond what the tranq had done to him. The pounding pulse of the Trials pulling away his strength, souring his stomach, twisting weeds into his lungs, burning through him blood and bone, the stench of rotting meat.

Sam shivered. It was summer. He wasn't outdoors. But he shivered and he sweat, and he dreamed fever dreams while he was wide awake.

Not dreams, Sammy...

The ceiling above him vanished into a pinpoint of light, dozens of them, constellations of hearts he'd made. They'd collapsed in on themselves, imperfect things, under the weight of the flaws in them, he couldn't help it, he couldn't make anything right. The raw materials were imperfect in the first place.

Too open under the stars, there were entire worlds he had created and watched as they developed and destroyed themselves, spun into oblivion or just self-destructed. Populated with people who could only grow black weeds in their chests. He could only give them his own heart, his own raw materials, and they grew black weeds in their chests, they grew black weeds in their gardens and they betrayed each other and killed and died and failed. Little worlds that Lucifer gave him, because it pleased him to watch when Sam's little universes collapsed over and over, millions of little lives Sam could not contain could not defend could not make correctly.

Sam heaved a breath. He could not bear to be suspended in that space, surrounded by failures. Somewhere there was a tiny city of bones and sinew that his clockwork mice lived in, somewhere there was a small place to burrow into, to feel pressing on him, a place that didn't pull him apart like the ever expanding universe, that didn't let him drift apart into molecules because god knew there wasn't enough substance inside him to keep him together unless there was something pressing in from all sides-

Sam squeezed his eyes shut. He wasn't suspended in the universe. He was strapped to a cot. He didn't know where, and he didn't know why, but he knew they were trying to get him to drink. Maybe they needed a weapon against demons? A demon-monster war they hadn't heard about? With all the chatter about the angels, it wouldn't have surprised him to find out there were problems they didn't know about.

But he felt too light still, even grounding himself, even gripping the mattress he was shackled to. He focused on Dean, on the burn of Dean's anger, because she thought she understood them - she knew Sam, sure, but she didn't understand anything. Dean pissed was a Dean that would burn the world to find Sam, if only to force him back into a space Dean created for him, to watch him, to keep him human, to watch the weeds grow, to tend the garden Sam couldn't be trusted to tend himself-

He shook. With the effort of staying present, with the knowledge that there was no present, with the cold and vacant void, a fourth dimension in which everything inside him spread out on the surface, and inside of that there was the essence of Sam, a thing that screamed and fought and burnt and broke and twisted-

He gasped for breath. His head, his chest, god his heart ruined and small now after peeling off so many little bits to try to give another thing life.

Light came. Day, around the blackout curtains drawn over the windows in the room where he was bound. He saw it without knowing it, his body awoke with it while he spun off somewhere else.

Wake up!

Sam blinked. Lucifer perched - full body now, for the first time since Amelia he seemed solid - he perched on a desk in the room, tsking at Sam, shaking his head.

"This is pathetic."

Sam didn't answer. He was just a memory, a hallucination. If he wasn't, how could Amelia just lock him away?

"Unless I'm just letting you believe you can control this for now. It's always a lot more fun to watch you squirm, Sammy. I mean come on. Really? A woman you run into when you're desperate and alone just happens to be a psychic shrink?"

Sam turned his head, blinked his eyes slow, mouth open. God he was thirsty. If it was light again already, it'd been at least twenty hours since he'd had anything to drink, coffee yesterday morning, and he knew he had a couple of days before he had to worry, but there was fire in his veins and sick in his stomach and his head god, and the heat and he shivered and he couldn't breathe-

"Awake, are we?"

She was real. The woman in red. Natalie. Lucifer was a weak enough presence that he blinked away when she showed up. Sam was almost grateful.

"This is difficult, I know."

Sam frowned at her, looked away in irritation. "Just let me go. You're making a huge mistake. I'm not gonna work for you, even if you do..." He swallowed. He could still taste the tang of demon blood on his tongue, after just the smell of it.

"Work for me?" She tilted her head. Sam could see now, in the light, how her eyes glinted gold at a certain angle. She shrugged. "I guess in a manner of speaking..." She smiled at him. "My King. It is our pleasure to serve you."

"You kidnapped me. Set me up. I'm tied to a bed," he said, pulling on his bindings in mounting frustration to illustrate, "And you're serving me?"

"Like I said. Difficult. Sam." She brushed hair from his face, tucked it behind his ear. "Give in. Help us. You are a noble King, I know it. Just... become. And you'll see you have a legion ready to serve you."

"I'm not a king!" Sam growled. "You're half a decade too late for this, and anyway, I'm not your king! You're not a demon. "So why-"

She sat up straight. He'd offended her. Wow. "A demon? No. Not yet," she said primly. "You want to know the hearts of your worshippers? It's simple. We don't want to go to Purgatory."

When she looked at him, Sam saw the woman who saw him as her hero at the police station, the woman who wanted to connect with him in the car. She was fucking sincere about this.

"You should have seen it," she said, looking off. "Chaos, fear. Terror in every home when we learned the truth. Where we go. It wasn't common knowledge, we thought we just... ended. But a few years ago, when the Leviathan surged through the world, we learned the truth. And now we know. We have souls. Not like you humans, or even like angels have grace, but we have something. And it goes to Purgatory because it doesn't belong anywhere else. But do you know what Purgatory is? It's a prison, designed by God to hold the Leviathan, the absolute evil. Do we really belong there? Shouldn't we get a chance to ascend into demonhood-"

"You want to be tortured for millennia and be turned into demons?"

She was quiet a moment. "We're going to be tortured either way. At least Hell gives us an end to it, a way back to a world we know."

Sam blew out a breath. "Look, I feel for you. I know what Purgatory's like. But I'm not drinking that stuff. I'm not your king. I'm not leading your cult. It wouldn't work anyway."

"I lead the followers of the faith, Sam. And I have a responsibility to my flock. We have been waiting for you for a long time, my King-"

"Five years isn't a long time, believe me."

"For centuries," she finished. She leaned in, serious as eternity. "Only recently, we learned what our fate really was, but we have always waited for you to save us from what we believed was a fate of nothingness. Don't you see? Your rise, our discovery of the truth? It's not a coincidence. It has been foretold that someone who walks the Path will be crowned King by the demons, and that human will be so filled with light he would shine as Lucifer shines, into every dark space. He would bring an equality to the fates of those of us who did not choose to be born like this, or to be turned into this. That fair minded leader drenched in blood and bathed in smoke is you."

Her words whispered into him, it felt like they sank into his skin, and the habitual allure of being able to help someone, after so long of having to earn redemption, having to find every scrap of "having helped" in order to earn a place at Dean's side, to earn a spot amongst the living. God it pulled at him, a more deeply ingrained addiction than the demon blood which had been lying in wait for him since he was six months old, because he could justify ruining himself to save the world and fix his own mistakes, but he could not justify wedging himself into a world he had no right to be in-

But he couldn't. He wouldn't be taken in by this roiling drive inside him.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I'm not your King."

Natalie stood from his bedside, watched him. "Then I'm sorry too. Perhaps one day you will resign yourself to this, you will rise to this. Until then." She shrugged. "Constance will be your personal physician." She gestured and the girl who'd given him water and asprin the day before came up. "Drain him, slow. Be careful with him."

Constance nodded, then came with her satchel and pulled the chair over. She looked frail, kinky airy curls around a brown face, but whatever kind of creature she was, it had strength. She twisted his arm still strapped down; he grunted and struggled, but she just shushed him and turned it anyway, held him still while she inserted a needle and a line and told him to remain calm or he'd bleed out. Kind, dark eyes, a sweet face, gentle hands if strong, and then a warm trail against his arm where the line ran down out of sight and he was concentrating on his fleeing heart.

"Please," he said.

"Rest, my King," she said.