Disclaimer: I don't own Supernatural.
Warnings: Self-harm and torment from Lucifer.
Sam knew his hand was broken the second it met the wall of his cell. Neither him nor Dean were strangers to broken bones and the distinct feeling of them compared to other injuries. He remembered breaking his hand when that TA couldn't handle the girl he was obsessed with dying, so he just had to bring her back. That case had resonated with Dean, who had recently been brought back from the brink of death himself at the cost of their father's life and soul.
He wondered if Dean still felt that the dead should stay dead.
They'd been injured and killed probably more than anybody else, but they knew to get injuries that were severe treated by a professional (they knew what they could and couldn't handle on their own), and Sam doubted that any of the guards even cared about his hand. They'd probably be happy to see it, as long as it caused Sam to suffer more. No wonder they were left alone, the guards didn't need to intervene to make their imprisonment worse than it was. Slowly losing their minds was bad enough as it was.
Or maybe it was just Sam slowly losing his mind. Was Dean still sane? Was Dean losing it as easily as he was?
He pressed down on the break, the discomfort of the shift of disconnected bones under his flesh, or the sound the bones made when they ground against each other, no longer bothering him. He wanted to feel the pain radiate through his hand. He wanted it to take away the voice of Lucifer like pressing the cut on his hand did in the past. Like reopening his stitches again and again used to.
"Why not just try breaking the other hand, too?"
Sam pressed down harder. "Shut up," he hissed through clenched teeth.
"Not working, is it? Not like the old days."
Sam spun around in his cell, looking desperately for a way out. It never felt more confining than it did in that moment. He swore that the walls were closing in on him, they would come closer and closer until they finally crushed him.
Or maybe it was his ribs that were closing in on his lungs, because breathing was becoming difficult and black spots flooded his vision from the lack of sweet oxygen (even if the atmosphere was composed of roughly seventy-eight percent nitrogen, twenty percent oxygen, and two percent other, but now wasn't the time for him to be remembering science classes from more than a decade and a half ago).
"You're really losing it this time, aren't you?"
Lucifer couldn't hide the glee in his voice, the mocking undertones that signaled he thought he won. After the first few decades in Hell, once the initial anger wore off, it was the only tone of voice Sam heard from him. When he realized that he may have lost, but Sam also lost by winning. When he realized that he could still win by breaking Sam and making him scream until his voice reverberated through all of Hell. When he realized that he wasn't caged alone this time and had Sam to be his endless entertainment.
The bones in his hand shifted again from the pressure he applied, and he knew that they wouldn't be returning to their original placement without the intervention of a medical professional (which would mean breaking his hand again just to set it by the time he could see a professional, if he could ever see one again). Since that was unlikely to happen as long as he was imprisoned, he resigned himself to the knowledge that he would have a forever mangled hand when it eventually healed. It would probably be too deformed to use properly by the time it managed to heal due to how many times Sam kept re-injuring it. How many times Sam shifted the bone fragments farther and farther from their initial positions.
"Not real," he said to his empty cell. "Not real. Not real."
"Oh, I'm very real, Sam. This is all very real. But if you want it to end, well, you know what to do."
Sam huffed out a humorless laugh at that. The Devil was telling him to kill himself in a cell, but what the hell in his cell was he supposed to use to kill himself?
"Wanna see if you can beat the record for most days without sleep again?"
Sam already felt exhausted from hearing Lucifer's voice when he was awake, and then seeing him every time he fell asleep. He leaned his back against the wall, and slowly sank down until he sat on the floor. He didn't care anymore about how filthy his cell was. After roughly six weeks, he was just as filthy. The guards never let him out of his cell, so he never got a chance to wash off any of the grime that accumulated on his skin.
"This can't be happening," he said.
He hit the back of his head against the wall. Not hard enough to do damage, but hard enough to leave a deep ache in his skull. Though that could have been attributed to Lucifer's unwillingness to leave him alone. To give him even a moment of peace.
"I'll be seeing you in Hell soon. You can't honestly believe that someone with demon blood who's made as many mistakes as you would be allowed into Heaven."
But a moment of peace always seemed to be too much to ask for.
Dean paced and banged his fists against every wall, hard enough that sometimes it felt like he broke his hand. Nothing was worse than knowing that Sam needed him, but being unable to be there to help Sam.
"Cas," he said, "you better be working your ass off to get Sam out of here."
When Lucifer tormented Sam, the aftermath was never pretty, and it was something Dean never wanted to deal with again. He wondered if Sam would be able to tell the difference between what was real and what was fake this time. He wondered if he would have to worry about Sam waving a gun around, and even pointing it at him because he couldn't be sure he was really Dean.
He ran his hand over his hair again, a little longer than he liked having it, but he wasn't expecting the guards to come in and give him a shave and a haircut (he couldn't imagine what Sam looked like with his hair left unchecked, he grew hair faster than anyone else Dean knew). Even though Cas promised that he was working to bust them out, every second that passed without the arrival of the escape party raised his anxiety over Sam's condition. It didn't help that Cas gave him so little information about Sam and he had no way of filling in the blanks about it either.
Sam might as well have been on the other side of the world.
Dean laid on the pathetic excuse for a bed in his cell. He didn't like begging, but he certainly wasn't above it. "Cas, I'm gonna go to sleep. Pop into my dream and update me on whatever the hell you've been doing. At least just tell me how Sam's holding up. You can't just tell me freaking Lucifer is bugging him and leave, man. You can't do that to me."
Dean closed his eyes and waited for sleep to come, and hoped that Cas would pay him a visit.
Sam tossed and turned on his bed, sheets tangled around his legs, but sleep wouldn't come. Not when Lucifer invaded his mind with the flash of a memory from Hell every time he closed his eyes until he was left with an aching head, as painful as it had been when he used to have visions that felt like they were splitting his skull apart. They always felt too real. He still felt the heat of the fire. He still felt the bite of meat hooks tethered to his flesh.
"Leave me alone," he said.
"It ends when you can't take it anymore."
It was the same line Lucifer always said, whether he was a hallucination or a reality. Sam knew very well what it meant, and that Lucifer would always be trying to get him to die, by his own hands preferably.
Sam laid and stared at the ceiling. He reminded himself that he's beaten The Devil before. Bobby told him those exact words when his mind was tearing itself apart after the wall crumbled and left him struggling to keep his grip on reality.
"Every other time you had Dean there to help you. Have you ever been able to do anything without him?"
Sam couldn't think of anything he'd really had to do on his own. When Dean wasn't there, Ruby had been. Even if it was all a huge mistake, he still hadn't been alone. But when he jumped into Hell, when the wall broke, when he tried to close the gates of Hell and got sicker and sicker with each trial, it was Dean who was there. Dean who did everything he could to help Sam make it through everything.
If he were being honest with himself, he didn't know if he could beat Lucifer without Dean.
"C'mon, Cas. You have to do something about Lucifer," he said. "We can't let him do whatever he wants in this world. He's distracted by me right now, but I know that won't last forever. I won't be able to take it forever. It's only a matter of time before he moves on to his next plan. Until he makes another mess."
Maybe it was selfish to beg Cas to get rid of his problems, but he wouldn't be able to last much longer if Lucifer refused to let him sleep.
Judging by the laughter echoing in his mind, that was exactly what Lucifer planned to do.
Author's Note: My method for balancing two in-progress stories has become alternating chapter updates between them. So, up next will be the next chapter of Becoming Human. If you haven't checked it or Leave Normal Alone (the story for which it is a sequel), check it out! Otherwise, stay tuned as we'll be getting back to Cas, Mary, Crowley, and Rowena next time around.
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