prompt
Why become a god if you can't avenge yourself on the way up?
***warnings: Lucifer***
Castiel lied. He wasn't the one who pulled Sam up from Hell, Sam was.
It was bloody and messy and savage. Lucifer was screaming from inside Sam, buried beneath thousands of eternities of inky-black darkness and searing rage. Every cut and bruise and burn on Sam's body pulsed with white-hot pain and yet he dragged himself up. He ripped the archangel's wings out from behind him and forced them to carry him up, the feathers burning and blackening with every flap in Hell's scorching heat.
There were demons that stood against him; their ashes rained down on the lower circles of Hell. Sam was burning and freezing all at once; he was being remade, inch by bloody inch. He tore Lucifer's divinity from him and relished in the screams as he took it for himself, comparing them to the ones Lucifer had pulled from his mouth for so many eternities. He dragged his soul along with him, forcing the shredded mess into his body, leaving his burnt handprints on it.
When Sam broke earth, it wasn't in a flash of blinding light or a heavenly glow. He pulled himself up, hand by bloody hand. Lucifer's wings dragged behind him, the feathers getting twisted and mangled and the archangel screaming inside him still. Sam paid no mind; he stood up on bloody legs and inhaled his first breath of fresh air. He tore Lucifer's wings out completely, letting the burned, bloody mass of feathers fall to the ground behind him.
He turned his power inwards, at the mass of Lucifer's grace burning bright inside him, twisting in pain, and held it tight in one mental hand. It stilled, Sam feeling the first spike of fear he'd ever felt from the archangel, and there was a moment of terrified silence before Sam squeezed.
He had been in the cage for a year, he had been tortured by Lucifer for over five hundred thousand eternities, and Sam put every ounce of his anger he'd built up into his power. Lucifer writhed and screamed in agony, pushing desperately against Sam's skin as he was slowly set on fire, but Sam was the cage and he had learned from Lucifer himself how to have iron control.
"You taught me control," Sam said in his mind to Lucifer, who simply screamed. "Remember that day?" he asked harshly.
"I remember," Sam said quietly. "I remember it all. 'Don't make any noise, Sammy, or I'll cut deeper.' It took me eighty eternities for me to learn, didn't it? And I did learn. I learned how to make pain into energy" - he squeezed tighter and Lucifer screamed louder - "and how to control everything I did, everything I said."
He smiled, darkly. "You forced me to learn how to control my mind, because if I didn't you'd cut into that too. And my soul, my voice, my body - this is all your fault, you know."
He loosened his grip a little, hearing Lucifer panting softly in his mind with pain, the grace twisting and writhing in his hand. "You taught me how to bide my time and wait. Wait until my opportunity came, and oh, it did. Five thousand eternities of rage and pain, all gathered up, and you thought the whole time you were breaking me. Every cut, every burn, everything you did to me only added to this."
He started squeezing again, feeling Lucifer's grace dwindling as it burned and his screams echoing in his mind before they quieted and Sam's hand was empty. He drew his power out from inside of him and filled the gaping hole left by Lucifer with the demonic energy, letting it course through him like fire in his veins. He inhaled, the air stinging and burning as it went down, as Sam was reborn in fire and ice and darkness.
The power thrummed through him, pulsing in time with his heart, burning against his wounds as it healed them. Massive, velvet-black wings unfurled behind him, hauntingly beautiful in their darkness, the tips of the feathers still glowing red with the fire they'd been forged in. Sam laughed with the sheer bliss of it; he was out of the cage and powerful and he had a lifetime of pain to administer justice for. He knew he wasn't an angel, or a demon, or even Nephilim. He was something other, infinitely darker and more powerful, and damn if he didn't use it to his full advantage. His fingertips sizzled with heat and power, the anger he'd built up during his time in the cage roiling and surging inside him.
Sam flew.