Disclaimer: I don't own Supernatural.
The entire place reeked of human depravity. A place he was told didn't exist, not officially.
Dean was there, too. Somewhere. Not near him, though. They were kept alone. Too dangerous to be left otherwise.
They thought they won, but Lucifer had the last laugh. He told his security detail that they were unstable mad men. He told them they were cult members.
He wasn't even back in The Cage. The only part of the plan that worked was expelling him from his vessel.
He wondered a lot about Dean and how he was holding up trapped in a room. Sam thought that he would handle sitting alone in a room better than his brother, who could never stay in one place for long before he wanted to crawl up the walls. Sam wouldn't have been surprised to find a rut in the floor of Dean's cell from his pacing.
But Dean wasn't the one with The Devil on his shoulder, and it seemed that Lucifer wanted to make Sam's imprisonment as unpleasant as possible.
He was supposed to be in solitary confinement, but he was never left alone.
He ran his fingertips over the concrete wall where he started making tally marks in an attempt to keep track of the days that passed. If he was correct, it'd been about six weeks.
If he was honest, it felt more like six years.
"More like fifteen years. You remember how time in The Cage works, don't you?"
"Shut up," Sam hissed.
It started with nightmares. Now, he was tormented by Lucifer day and night. Now, he couldn't tell if it was Lucifer mocking him, or the Lucifer his mind created mocking him.
He thought that he would be able to hold up better alone in a room than Dean, but he was wrong. It was too much like The Cage. It was too confining. It lacked the smell of sulfur and blood, but made up for it with the stench of urine and mold.
The only human contact (using the word loosely) came three times a day when a guard slid a tray of cold slop through the slot in his door, and then three more times when the tray was collected. It didn't have to be empty when they collected it. The guards didn't care if a prisoner starved himself to death.
After all, the people on the other side of the doors were the scum of the earth to the guards, and Sam wondered if they would ever just execute him because he wasn't seeing another way out of there.
Lethal injection. Electric chair. It didn't matter.
Sam stood in the middle of the room, mirrors lining the walls. He watched his reflection walk in slow circles around him.
He wasn't moving.
It wasn't hard to figure out that Lucifer was his reflection. It wasn't hard to figure out that he invaded his dreams yet again.
He'd invaded them every night since Sam was locked away. As a memory or real, it didn't make much difference.
He grinned at Sam. "Even when I lose, I still win," he said.
The worst part about the dreams was being unable to wake himself up with a simple pinch or reality check. Being forced to stay and listen to Lucifer's gloating.
"I'm having so much fun being out and free. I don't suppose you know the feeling anymore."
"Shut up."
It was usually all he said to Lucifer now. There was nothing else left to be said.
He laughed, but it was Sam's laugh. Twisted and distorted into something inhuman.
"Inhuman?" Lucifer echoed.
Sam often forgot that his thoughts weren't safe when they were both inside his mind.
"You have to be human before you can become inhuman," Lucifer said. "And you never were that, were you?"
Azazel appeared in the mirrors, yellow eyes aglow as he loomed over a crib and let his hand drip blood into the waiting mouth of an infant.
As quickly as it appeared, it was gone again.
"You were tainted. You're still tainted. You wanted to believe that The Trials were curing you, like it was some disease that could be gotten rid of," Lucifer said. He stepped out of the mirror and closer to Sam. "Except that they weren't and it isn't. The Trials were burning you from the inside, weren't they? Killing you instead of curing you. And the whole demon blood situation, well, that's permanent. It's not a sickness, it's a condition of being. A condition of your being my true vessel."
"Shut up," Sam said. "Get out of my head!"
He woke up tangled in thin, dirty sheets and covered in sweat.
His "breakfast" arrived shortly after, and he still was unsure if it was supposed to be oatmeal or something else. It certainly didn't taste like anything familiar, and it took him the first week or so to get used enough to it that he didn't throw it right back up. That part wasn't so much due to the taste as it was the cold, congealed texture.
He ate and carved another tally mark into the wall. Six weeks, give or take. It only took that long for his mind to regress to the point it'd been at when the wall in his mind broke. How much longer would he be trapped there? How much longer until his sanity passed the point of no return?
"You know how it ends."
"Shut up."
The last time Sam prayed in the traditional way had been at Pastor Jim's parish as a child, but he found himself on his knees beside the cot in his cell with his hands folded and his head bowed.
"Cas," he said. "Castiel, I don't know if you're listening. I don't think Chuck is these days. But, uh, if you can hear me, I don't know where Dean and I are. I guess it's one of the places the government made for the worst of the worst. The kind of place that doesn't officially exist. Doesn't matter. What does matter is that Lucifer is alive. Rowena's spell didn't work and he's not in The Cage. If you're gonna do anything, work on taking care of him. Dean and I… we'll be fine."
He didn't know if he was supposed to tag an 'amen' on the end of his prayer. Was that still part of the protocol when he was praying to an angel, or was that the kind of thing reserved for God?
He moved to sit on the cot, used to how thin its mattress was. This had been Henricksen's wet dream once upon a time, before he learned about the things in the dark, to have the Winchesters tucked away in a maximum security prison. If only Henricksen was still alive to help them out of this mess.
When completely deprived of their senses, test subjects of a psychology experiment barely made it four days before they descended into madness. Sam remembered that from the psychology course he had to take for social science credits. The same course where he met Jess a lifetime ago.
Of course, it'd been more than four days, and Sam wasn't completely sensory deprived, but he felt the descent into madness beginning to fray the edges of his mind. It seemed almost physical, like it could fill in his cell and swallow him in its shadows.
He didn't know how much was due to Lucifer's influence and how much was due to the isolation. He hoped for it to be Lucifer's influence, if only because that meant Dean would be unaffected by the isolation. He could keep his sanity and move on if they ever got out.
"We've been here so many times, haven't we, Sam?" Lucifer asked.
Lucifer in his true form. The only time Sam saw him like that was in The Cage. Had he been alive, seeing an angel's true form like that would have burned out his eyes. Dead (his body and soul separated during the fall in) and in Hell, it just made him wish that his eyes could be liquefied by fire.
The twisted bars that formed the boundaries of The Cage were made of a material Sam never knew outside of Hell. It was beautiful and terrible, the divine work of a somber heart (did Chuck have a heart?).
"There's only one ending in store for you," he said. "No matter how many times you try to escape it, you'll always end up right back here. With me. Forever."
"No," Sam said. "You're wrong."
"I'm right," Lucifer said. He came closer until Sam felt like every fiber that composed his soul was being torn apart by the mere unholy presence of Lucifer. "I've always been right."
Lucifer could torture a soul without touching it, and sometimes that was worse than when he decided to be more hands-on.
No matter how many years passed, the feeling of both never faded from Sam's memories. There were some things that Cas couldn't transfer to himself. Some burdens that he couldn't take away and place on his own shoulders.
The Cage hurt even in his dreams, and Sam screamed until he could no longer tell if the screams came from him at all.
"You know how this ends, Sam. When you can't take it anymore and you end up right back here."
Sam woke up back in his concrete cell. Maybe these were considered inhumane living conditions purely due to the size and sanitation standards, but it was a palace compared to The Cage.
He didn't know if that dream was just made of the echoes of his time in The Cage abusing the unstable state of his mind, or another visit from Lucifer. He isn't sure that Lucifer wouldn't just start off his madness and let it snowball out of control on its own.
He's only sure that deliverance from his cell and death are equally appealing options now. Six weeks was a long time to hope for a rescue, and he didn't want to spend forty years or so locked alone in a prison that didn't exist to the public.
If anything, his only regret would be not getting to see Dean one last time. They weren't on bad terms, but he still had a lot of things he wanted to tell Dean. A lot of things he wanted to thank Dean for, but never had the chance to.
He closed his eyes, knowing that he wouldn't find sleep again soon after a nightmare like that, and Lucifer's words echoed through his mind.
"You know how this ends, Sam."
Author's Note: Is this unlikely? Probably, but I can't resist the opportunity to write Lucifer tormenting Sam. It's going to be hard waiting until January for the next episode, but I guess that's what fanfiction is for!
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