Disclaimer: Supernatural ain't mine.
Warnings: I can't even tell anymore, but I'm going to go ahead and say this is gory and not good. Also, Lucifer's thinky thoughts are in here.
A/N: GEEZ LOIUS! This took forever to get out. UGGGH. I've been hella busy and was also trying to add onto this chapter one bit at a time, which makes it difficult to get into a writing flow, BUT ANYWAYS. Here it is. I can only hope it is good, because everything is a blur after these past few weeks.
Also, there will be two more full chapters after this one, requests will be fulfilled, and there will be an epilogue in similar style to the prologue.
Read, enjoy, review! :)
The devil is evil and tempts when he speaks.
Satan brings pain.
Lucifer holds humanity misused.
And
Morningstar comes and there is nothing more.
Just as Sam tires of torture, Lucifer tires of creating them. So sometimes, he likes to dig through the classics, let someone else hold the torch to Sam (this time, the phrase is used figuratively).
Sam is held to the ground, pushed along when he is too weak to crawl. Lucifer watched as one of his sinners created a field spanning metal as the setting, and he watches still as Sam is torn apart by shining, iron (because isn't Sam ever so found of his iron?) nails as he edges along.
It is pain, and isn't it a sight?
Hell is a special place.
Lucifer made it patiently, anger shaping his world into one that was torn into sharp shards. The eons grow like fungus, taking with it new souls and demons, an overflowing fleet of terror.
This means that there is, of course, torture. Of which is unique, if one has grown through the ranks. Of which is painful, blunt and clumsy, for the rest of them.
Lucifer likes to think, and by this he means that he is right and proves his worth some days only because he likes to, that he is the best.
He knows the way to a soul's heart, just as he knows his way along their nerves and through their mind. He's a professional after all.
Still, he shares little of himself to this pathetic place, his whimpering, sodden pride and joy. He has shared a small bit of himself- when he feels especially gracious, but he has not felt the inclination to for a long time.
The one that comes to mind is of the first to fall at his feet.
He had named her Lilith and stroked her face with a grinder for half a century. By then, she was a gnarled mess of meat. Nothing else. It was, in retrospect, a clumsy first attempt, but he was a pioneer and it was a rather fruitful as first attempts go.
Because he did so churn her right, reforming the first sinner into demon and there was not a word for what he had done. Now there is: demons and hell and torture and wrong.
He was so proud.
He had never realized he could be prouder though and had grown compliant to his dimming whims of bringing pain. At least, until whispers floated to his humble little flame pit and he realized he was to be given a vessel. This was a millennium ago, but he did so improve his craft for the day it would happen.
So he built his hopes up, closing himself off from the rest of Hell and sharpening his skills with a select few.
Though he rarely repeats himself, he can't help but lament the loss of his waking dream of Hell on Earth.
He put so much of himself into it, that he feels a bit chipped. Which does bring him back, full circle, to the point.
Though he does hold a strong distaste for most things and is achingly aware of how he lost Hell on Earth, he has an elitist taste in sadism that is the perfect fit to Sam's permanent stay in Hell.
Now, his pride grows tenfold.
Sam is in his hold again and Lucifer is beginning to think time is turning soon.
Soon, he thinks to himself. He has plans for Sam. He always does, but it is a careful precision that he uses to introduce Sam to his world. Because Sam is not from here and his mind cannot truly appreciate what Lucifer wants to introduce him to, if Sam has not learned the realms to which Hell spans.
Meanwhile, Lucifer puts his palm against Sam's back and feels the spasms of each shearing nailed impact Sam is graced with.
"You poor thing," he murmurs against the curve of Sam's spine (which is actually visible and sort of enthrallingly beautiful).
Sam, a speckling of idea and hope and purpose, had once turned foolish "morality" towards wronging Lucifer and pushing them both down, down, down.
How is a god meant to react to such utter treachery by his dearly departed (because that's what has become of Sam, fallen then dead; surfacing to conscious Hell)? Doubtlessly, Lucifer felt a vivid, lurid fury as they sunk.
So he wanted Sam to hurt. And it was easy.
This is where his talent lies after all- and how could it not, when he is the all father of Hell, of the vindictive, thrashing lot that screams more, more, more let us see the blood, will they break for me (because they all scream it eventually)?
But this digression in the evil needling running through his Hell aside, he is good at it.
He unhesitatingly pushes Sam through gore and horror- starting small, getting worse, ebbing and flowing.
He chains Sam, gives him choices (not to follow through on, but to suffer from knowing what these choices are) and Sam chooses death more often than not.
He takes pieces of Sam, shows Sam what it's like to not be Sam any longer (to show him what he has done to dear old Lucy, a blotch of dark taken from his destiny and demoted).
He shows Sam kindness, so Sam will be achingly aware of everything that still is (for there is an elsewhere away from Hell), but that he cannot have. And his favorite thing out of most things is when Sam comes to him, crawling into opened arms, deliciously pathetic and what Lucifer might dream of if dreams ever came to a place like this.
Then (all at once and he's longed for this again and again ever since) he opens Sam up, in every way possible, and watches as the heart of his treasure disappears; draining away one spilt drop of blood at a time.
And what does Lucifer do? He lets Sam go, of course. He lets Sam wash away into the dreamy escape of heroism and he lets Sam reclaim the parts of him that were hanging off in torn bits of flesh and spirit. Because Sam must be Sam forevermore, but Lucifer will not simply let him go.
And now, Lucifer sees Sam is ready, so he is called back to finish the incomplete puzzle of Lucifer's beating, throbbing "heart" (may he borrow Sam's for this purpose?).
Sam does not realize the gifts he has.
Not many are so swollen with Lucifer's love.
Sam is swollen.
He wades, the ring of water circling his moving form and splashing with gentle drips. Buoyant enough, as in enough to stay upright and to flail all the while, he lasts for days.
It is quiet.
Foot in front of foot, sinking only so low but always moving, always alive with feeling, the hope he shouldn't have had begins to drown.
He thinks to himself, because he has no other choice but to do think himself through this, "One more second. Again. One more second. Again."
This is something he has come to do over the course of ticking moment after moment, spanning too unlike Earth's flow to be familiar and creating an encompassing unknowing of everything- time, existence, breadth, and breath- without this.
So (not time…) something passes with each submersion.
And that is how he counts now. The first submersion, the second submersion (he is on his fifth now)…
When a man is waterlogged, it is only through the same, always absolutely guaranteed process of mutilation that it can happen:
Submersion One: Water. It is a gentle introduction. Cool along his skin, soft and flowing. The water trickles, soothing in repetition.
Sam waits.
Submersion Two: Panic. The water is foreign, something to reject. Deep, gasping breaths overwhelm, narrowing vision and exemplifying the cool touch of watery death. The mind lifts him, the water lifts him, and it is all unreal. As if this might as well be it; as if he'd do well to return to that broken place where he once locked himself away to become the slave of Hell's God, despairing but somewhere other than here.
But then he takes one lungful mixed with water and the cape of distraction flutters away from him- a sort of whimsical absence on par with the delusions he undoubtedly suffers from.
He sees Dean who tells Sam that he might have been safe had he not been such a wretched disappointment. He sees Bobby who says he never felt quite right around Sam, tried though he did to push aside the hunter's instincts that screamed, monster, that's what Sam is, and treat Sam like his own.
Submersion Three: It, the firstly physical manifestation of waterlog, is when skin starts to peel, falling away around him and floating loftily around his watered form. Pruning, loosening and wrinkling, a man grows unrecognizable. Sam would howl in pain, if not for the water sloshing down his throat.
The fibers of skin become identifiable. Sinews unbraid and the skin expands into a loose sagginess that comes from this. The skin turns to pasty film like that of a snake's abandoned coating and raises- as if it has been injected with water running below skin.
He stands thickly, body growing as water seeps into him and his skin morphs into something that is wrong when worn on the human body.
This is called bloating.
Let us call it a garden. Let us say that he is, well, accustomed to the pearling of red liquid fallen upon his flowers; blossoming, brighter than anything, a beacon amidst the shadows he has created.
Let us admit that he does feel a certain deeply imbedded tenderness for brutality, as he does also feel an accompanying tenderness for scorn and hatred and his soul mate.
And so it is, as recognized and acknowledge by few though it may be, that he really does, truly, know of love.
Because he waits out his days- these wriggling, bludgeoned days- adoringly parading his all-time lover through the trenches along the palm of his gutted world.
Hints of whispers: this is his deceit, his teasing game swirling alongside Sam's growing madness.
The backhand of soul: this is his caress, strong then gentle then torturous and he finds the great depths to which Sam bruises to be sickly sweet, addicting.
The solitary moments: these are the times when Sam is well kept along his side, blind and soundless and almost a doll if not for his pure radiating pain that paralyzes everything except for the rubbing of flesh against flesh.
And he is the creator; an entrepreneur of the jaded, slaughtering variety, molding men and women and (his) lover alike into something not like they once were.
Sam is literally not how he once was. He is disgusting, drowning in Lucifer's pool and Lucifer thinks Sam can wait for a little while longer.
Submersion Four: When nails start to unbind and pull away from nail bed, the lesser pain, as the sensitive first layer of nerve has been eroded away by this submersion, is realized.
Sam watches as he is undone.
And now, Sam is on his fifth. And this is the one where he isn't alive in any sense of possibility, closer to dead really, but he is still aware.
His face- no- the mass that was his face now caves in and grows with boils bursting of water; discolored eyes closed in by flaps of the falling membrane of his eyelids; lips suckling desperately for air, sound long gone.
His body is no longer a body. His body is separated, numbed and heavy. It flies away in tears of flesh and the water, unknown to him, fills with his blood and feces.
He is still losing control.
So he is close to dead, but not. Because this is Hell.
The sixth submersion never comes.