Summary: Sam falls into the Cage. But the Cage is Nothing, and suddenly Lucifer becomes Everything.
Disclaimer; I do not own Supernatural, nor any of the characters, ideas, concepts, or other materials within.
Though the Brightest Fell
Sam falls.
Lucifer is screaming protests inside his mind, searing him from the inside out. Through the pounding of his skull and Adam-Michael's panicked scrambling at his arms, the yawning blackness as they plummet is almost ignored.
Then they reach Hell.
It flickers past, but Sam sees snatches of despair from every direction. A women weeps on a rack, eyes clawed out, body flayed free of skin, distorted forms of smoke and Sin grawing at her liver. A man, screams and sobs, boiling water scalding his head, his hands, his torso, as spikes are forced down his throat. There's a child, petite and twisted and lovely, cracking the bones of a grown man as he shrieks for mercy, mercy, Lord have mercy -
And then it is gone, behind them, forgotten, and there is only Darkness.
It might be a second or a lifetime later when Sam regains awareness. There is no sense of time in the Cage, no sense of anything. Sam knows he is falling, falling, falling, but there is nothing below, and twilight all around.
I'm going to go mad, he thinks. It's a ludicrous thought in Hell, but somehow he didn't imagine this. Pain Sam can handle, but not the terrible sense of Nothing.
And then there is light, radiant and glorious light. Sam tries to flail closer, though he does not feel or see his limbs, but he's just fallingfallingfalling. It make no difference, though. The light continues to draw near, and Sam can see six arching wings, huge and spanless and gleaming with a blue sheen, and six terrible heads - beautiful heads, even from a distance, set in marble like a living statue. Michael, Sam thinks. The archangel has never been an ally, but - maybe -
Sam thinks he hears a whisper of his name in the twilight, thrumming like a deep drum and a high harp all at once in the vast emptiness of the expanse. The sound is queerly muffled though, hitting him and dying suddenly, because the darkness swallows any reverbation.
"Sam."
"Sam."
"Sam."
I'm here, Sam tries to say, to scream, to yell, but nothing comes out. It doesn't matter. He calls again, not even caring to be found but just wanting to hear.
I'm here, I'm here, I'm here -
"Sam."
And suddenly the Darkness is not dark. A piercing, burning brightness is closing in, steadily approaching even as Sam continues to plummet. When it draws near Sam can make out the six heads, and he sees that the middle is the graceful and snarling visage of a Dragon. The other heads hiss and gleam with a dark light - snake, goat, bull, crow, and, incongruously, a lamb. And Sam, quite suddenly, can no longer deny the identity of the divine light.
Lucifer.
"Sam."
The brilliant form sweeps circles around him as Sam falls, fall, falls. It's so quiet, is all Sam can think to say, but the silence reigns. Can the devil hear him?
The Dragon flashes a sharp shimmer of fangs. A smile.
"Not anymore."
So they fall together, and nothing else is said for awhile. Sam can hear the wing-beats of Lucifer, and see the devil's glow - Lightbringer, he thinks, with a strange giddiness - and that's enough. No thought required, nothing deeper. Of course, the devil ruins everything.
"Perhaps now you understand."
Really? Seriously? Surely, surely, the devil can't expect to commiserate with Sam. Not after he tried to destroy everything. Lucifer is the reason Sam is here.
So Sam doesn't respond, but just asks, When do we hit the bottom?
"There isn't a bottom."
There must be a bottom.
This is Hell, Sam. Are you really going to start applying logic?
And Sam couldn't asnwer that because, well, it was a damn good point.
So they fall, and fall, and fall.
"It goes on forever," whispers the devil, and Sam looks away from the light for a moment in discomfort - just a moment, a brief, brief moment, but the endless Black makes panic claw up his (isitstillthere?) throat, so he turns back quickly to watch the gleaming Dragon.
"We might as well talk," Lucifer reasons. "There is little else to do. I can keep my sanity here - " Sam thinks he snorts, though it's hard to tell in the silence. If he does, Lucifer ignores it. " - but the Cage was never meant for a human."
Because you were meant to stay in the Cage, Sam responds.
The Dragon's head hisses. Sam is unrepentant. What more can Satan do now?
Why don't you find Michael? Sam wants to know.
There is a brooding, almost angry silence, still and bitter, and Sam maybe-shrugs. The inability to feel his body is becoming... disconcerting.
Maybe he's insane. Hell, maybe he's always been insane. Angels and demons and devils, oh my. Any psychiatrist would have a field day with Sam Winchester.
...good lord, Lucifer is right. He'll go mad here.
But that seems a better alternative to cozying up with the devil.
There are a few things he wants to know first, though.
Where is your vessel?
There is a pause. "I left his shell falling," comes the trilling hiss of the great serpent. "That man's soul has long been gone."
In Heaven?
A gleam of fangs. "He gave his soul to the devil, Sam."
...Oh.
Adam? Michael?
Lucifer hisses; every head turns away, except, weirdly, the lamb, which stares at Sam with shiny, disconcertingly liquid eyes. "I... encountered Michael briefly, in his true form. It would take a long while to find him again, however. And the other human is likely still falling."
Damn - poor Adam really drew the short straw genetically, huh? He didn't even know anything about hunting, and now he's trapped in the Cage of Hell for eternity...
"Sam?"
Sam does not respond. He has his answers; he will give nothing else to this shade, this devil. He will just fall, and that will be enough.
The devil does not say his name again. They fall together, spiralling downward in long circles, Sam imagines, though there is no reference point so they might be falling straight down. But there's something poetic in this, spiralling down, lower than the lowest point of Hell, with the devil as his sole companion. Something... Just. Lucifer might have been the originator of sin, but Sam kick-started the apocalypse, so he figures this is, as Gabriel would say, 'just desserts'.
The devil watches him a long while. At first he stares with six heads, but eventually the lamb averts its liquid gaze. Next the crow looks away, the goat, the bull, the snake - and then there is just the towering center, the Dragon, with dark eyes and flaring nostrils and the odd tendril of blue-red flame frothing from a scaly maw, a brilliant contrast to the Nothing.
But then, at last, the Dragon looks away, and in a twist and flare of blue-black, leathery wings Satan is winging away, away, away, until he is nothing but a tiny speck of light in the distance, eventually too far for Sam to discern at all. And he realizes, quite suddenly, that he is alone.
Sam tries to distract himself. He becomes lost in memory, reliving every moment of his life, every pleasant memory with Dean or other friends. He cycles through particularly happy recollections a hundred times over, but somehow that makes them lose meaning. So then he moves on to remembering the faint, wispy memory of a good movie, a good book. He never told Dean, who would call him a bitchy nerd and never let the younger brother hear the end of it, but Sam had memorized a few favorite poems, and even the entirety of Shakespeare's Macbeth.
MALCOLM. ...Angels are bright still, though the brightest fell;
Though all things foul would wear the brows of grace,
Yet grace must still look so.
MACDUFF. I have lost my hopes...
Much as Sam loved Shakespeare, though, there was only so long you could repeat all those 'thou's and 'wheretofore's and 'oft's before wanting to bludgeon your brain out for a little relief - especially when you were just reiterating the same story again and again and again...
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...
Sometimes, Sam misses Lucifer. Almost. At least with his presence there was something to watch, something different, a light in the darkness. And now there is Nothing.
But, no. Of course he doesn't really want Lucifer. Lucifer is the devil, after all. He would see the entirety of the world dead and laugh about it. It is better for him to be gone.
Really.
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
The poems are tiring too, after a time. So he makes up stories instead, and lets his imagination loose. He starts with bits of real life, fun fantasies that could now never be real. When that starts to feel stale and overly repetitive, he moves onto fiction. But Sam has never been a writer, not really, and soon every idea is an over-used theme, none of it new.
How can there be anything new in the Nothing?
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand?
And then there is light, new and bright, flickering in the distance. Sam is filled with equal parts trepidation and relief, despair and hope. The devil will be his savior from madness, but he knows, instinctively, that Lucifer will also be his damnation.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
But, can this be Lucifer? The glow seems more dim than Sam remembers...
And when it comes closer, Sam sees that it is not the archangel he has known, but another, because the center of its six heads is a savage lion, fangs gleaming as cruelly as the Dragon's had, long ago. His wings are a blinding white, and the other heads hiss as the figure flaps toward him: eagle, horse, panther, wolf... and, weirdly, a sloth.
Michael, he cries, because any company is better than none. I'm here.
There is no response, but it seems to Sam that the flapping wings quicken, and then Michael is on him -
There is pain, hot pain, burning pain, and it is agony and ecstasy all at once. He hurts, but he is feeling pain, feeling for the first time in untold ages, and even as he screams with a silent throat he half-welcomes the agony.
Yes, he wants to say, and No, and Why are you doing this? If words come out, Sam doesn't know, but Michael just swarms him with Grace, plucking at Sam's soul and twisting, turning, burning -
It feels like a hundred years, so long that the white-hot pain is a new Nothing, a new numbness, and he wonders if this is what normal Hell feels like.
And then suddenly the pain is gone, over, and Sam is in the suddenly soothing black Nothing of before, staring in shock as two towers of light and fire spin and clash in front of him.
A Dragon is sparring with a lion, a snake chasing a sloth, a wolf stalking a lamb. A tiger pounces on a goat and a panther wrestles with a bull. The eagle and crow come together in a flurry of talon and wicked beak, and Sam just gapes at them as he falls, falls, falls -
There is a sudden lull, the two backing apart and preparing to fling themselves back into the fray - but the Dragon, of no accord, swings down and shoots for Sam. The Lion is startled, jerking forward to where the Dragon had been, and Sam sees Michael's six heads swinging about just as Lucifer sweeps him away.
They outdistance Michael until Sam has lost sight of the enraged archangel, and Sam is left dangling by a marble-white arm of an ex-archangel as a shining crow pecks at his head and a lamb gazes at him with baleful eyes. Sam stares, then maybe-sighs, and leans into the tingling warmth of the creature's arms.
And then Lucifer stops flying, and they're falling together again.
There is a silence, but not a very long one, it seems - or maybe Sam has been falling so long that it's only short when speaking relatively. But it is a comfortable sort of silence, and maybe that's why Sam has to break it.
Do you know Shakespeare?
And then every head of the Dragon is looking at him. The middle head is glowering and suspicious. The crow cackles at him. But Sam watches the lamb, and its tiny ears perk up.
"I read parts. On Earth."
So Sam starts to speak.
WITCHES. When shall we three meet again/In thunder, lightning or rain?...
Lucifer listens to the entire play with rapt attention. And it occurs to Sam, suddenly, that maybe Lucifer can't feel himself, can't hear himself speak.
Maybe he's just as numb as Sam.
We are in a Cage, he thinks. An endless Cage, where no one can harm anyone else. Torture one another, maybe, in an endless cycle, but what can past sins mean here?
The old Sam would have protested the thought. The devil is the devil, after all, no matter the place. The old Sam would have been horrified. The old Sam would have screamed at Lucifer and denied him and hated him, would have plotted methods of murder and vengeance and retribution.
The old Sam had not known the Nothing.
So Sam keeps speaking, though he cannot hear the words. Lucifer asks him to repeat 'The Second Coming' twice, and is strangely fond of Edgar Allen Poe, though he twitches if Sam mentions an author-name, like it reminds the devil that humans conceived of these poems, and it's a testament to how twisted everything has become that Sam just stops mentioning them.
Sam runs low on ideas, and there is a lull. Then, a shiver of movement, and suddenly all six of Lucifer's mouths open, and there is Song.
It shivers though the Nothing, a wistful song of sorrow and joy, high and twining and throbbing. The crow does not caw, the snake does not hiss. Instead the crow is a set of gothic chimes, the snake a flute, the lamb a viola. The bull becomes a low bassoon, murky and deep, and the goat warbles out like a great trumpet. And the Dragon is all of them and things undefined, an orchestra alone, indescribable and magical and impossible.
It is a song of Creation, Sam thinks, and he knows it to be true, so why is there still Nothing? He can half imagine trees and vales and streams shimmering into place around them, born of song and light, and the Nothing is suddenly jarring and wrong.
"I was once the angel of music," comes Lucifer's voice from the Dragon, and his voice sounds small and thin after the wonder of the song. But there is a lingering echo in his tone, a faint shadow of beauty, and it makes Sam's heart ache.
That was beautiful, he says, and he means it.
Sam gives stories of earth, telling of old hunts and childhood hurts and general human oddness, and Lucifer sings and sings and sings, filling the Darkness until Sam can almost feel water running over his feet, spilling over his throat, and a faux wind is running over his cheeks while the sun's heat beats over maybe-there shoulders. Sometimes they switch, and Lucifer waxes eloquent of the time before the Fall and the life of Heaven, and Sam sends the once-devil into paroxysms of laughter with poor, deaf attempts at replicating human songs. Seeing the devil laugh is a treat in itself, not half because each head convulses and twists around the others.
One day, there is something strange. A bright, burning light wafts in from somewhere in the fathomless Nothing above. It glows very faintly, weaker even than that of Michael, but it is coming for Sam.
Lucifer curls around him, the Dragon snapping at the glowing intruder darkly. But it squirms past, reaching very certainly to Sam, and the human cries out as he's pulled -
But Lucifer pulls back. When Sam settles against the stinging-warm devil he's bewildered to see the light floating back upward with a body. It's been a long while, but it looks like his body.
What?
"You are just a soul now, Sam." Lucifer sounds puzzled.
Oh. A pause. Is that bad?
"It makes no difference."
And Sam still can't feel himself, so it really doesn't. Lucifer lets go, and they spiral again, because the glowing smoke doesn't matter. It is one moment in eternity, and everything moves on the same as before.
Sometimes Lucifer gets tired of falling, so he grabs Sam and flies them in the Nothing, though there is no possible destination. But Sam doesn't mind, and just leans into the soothing burn of the devil's skin and enjoys the thump of wings. Lucifer can't feel himself flying, but Sam can, and Lucifer can feel Sam, so everything works just fine.
Once they wing over Adam, who is falling in the same heedless way that Sam once had. The human looks up and screams as he sees them, but then, he was already crying, just quietly. He's writhing and muttering and Sam knows, immediately, that his half-brother is insane.
His guardian angel left him, says Sam, and for some reason Lucifer finds this funny.
"A devil is better than an angel," Lucifer proclaims, and how can Sam disagree with the proof right in front of him?
So they fall and sing and tell stories, and occasionally fly, and somehow that's all that's needed. Sam makes up more stories, but now he and Lucifer fashion them together, and between the two of them there is no end of imagination. Sam teaches Lucifer the words and people of Macbeth, and eventually they split the parts in a way that makes sense and enact the entire play together. Lucifer takes more parts, because he has more heads.
Sam improves his singing. He is still deaf to his own voice, but Lucifer is patient. They have an eternity, after all.
There is Nothing, but suddenly Lucifer has become Everything.
Sam doesn't know how long he has been in the Cage, because there is no concept of time, but he knows that they do many things besides recite Macbeth, and Macbeth has been recited roughly eight million times, as Lucifer claims, so it's been awhile. And abruptly, for the first since that early smoky-light, there is something Different.
A creeping, choking presence, inconceivably darker than the Nothing, yet more natural. It creeps out tendrils of Shadow, pulling at Sam, who panics. Lucifer's attempt to shield him is batted aware with derisive scorn, the new darkness dissipating the archangel's light and pushing him back. It is not Nothing; it is Death. And, for the first time in eons, Sam is not falling, but rising.
There is light.
Light. Light everywhere, but weak light, dim light, a light of the too-physical Sun that has nothing on the Morninstar. And a face is there, a face from a tens of thousands of years ago, vague and human, and only half recognizable.
"Sammy!" Dean cries. "You're - my god - how do you feel?"
Sam Winchester is no longer in Hell. The devil is gone.
"Great," he lies. He hears his voice, and it is sour and flat and wrong. It does not sing. It is not the voice of a Dragon. "I feel great."
Dean still looks a little uncertain. "You - you're sure? Sammy, I mean... You're you?"
"I'm me," says Sam, and smiles a little faintly, a little hollowly. He can feel himself smile, and that's wrong, too. "Though I would be better with the laughter of a lamb," he murmurs, and somewhere by the door Castiel frowns.
Dean doesn't hear, and hugs him tightly, wet-eyed and suddenly speechless, and Sam listlessly returns it.
But that's fine. Honestly. None of it matters. Sam started the apocalypse, after all. He'll find his way back to Hell eventually.
What's a few decades to an eternity?
I'm considering a sequel, where Sam imagines Hallucifer after all this? Haven't decided yet. Hope you enjoyed!
Any reviewers; Did you think this was in-character? Much appreciated!
Poems:
Excerpts from 'Macbeth', by William Shakespeare
Excerpts from 'The Second Coming', by William Yeats.