A/N: This chapter is why I warned 'graphic violence/torture' in the summary of this story. Brace for disturbing imagery, please!
Castiel stepped up behind Dean's staggered form. The eldest Winchester's head was bowed, eyes closed and cheeks tear-stained. Castiel slid one arm over his chest, the other around his waist, and waited as Dean slowly recuperated.
"You can do this, Dean," Castiel whispered as his body began to grow, his black wings appearing and stretching out behind him. Oblivious, Dean gave a small nod and latched onto the angel's arms wrapped tightly around him.
"Good," Cas murmured, "you must hold tight. Do not let go until I tell you to let go. Do you understand?" Dean nodded again and felt Castiel's body against his back change, sensing the angel's true form emerging behind him.
"I understand," he said solemnly, hearing wings and feathers fluttering and expanding out on either side of him. They were so loud, powerful, they blocked out the storm's rolling, roaring thunder above.
"Cas?" Dean's voice broke and Castiel tightened his hold on Dean.
"Yes?" Cas responded, his voice different now: calm and smooth.
Dean's chest heaved with emotion, and he rolled the back of his head against the angel's shoulder.
"Thank you," he rasped quietly, another tear spilling over onto the back of Castiel's arm.
"Do not cry," Castiel said softly, and lowered his head down against the side of Dean's, "I believe in you, Dean Winchester."
Massive cloaking wings shot out past Dean and latched onto two bars of the cage. Ripping, scoring sounds of metal and electricity shot through the air and Dean watched as the bars smoldered red and bent apart by the angel's brute strength and power.
Castiel clasped Dean harder against his chest as the hole between the bars widened. Limbo's thunder above was muffled then silenced by a shrill, glass-shattering ringing that kept increasing in volume. Dean had heard the sound. It took him back to a small convenience store shortly - the one he'd found after having crawled out of his own grave.
Suddenly Dean was launched towards the space between the bars, passing through them at a ferocious speed. Within a split second Dean realized the acceleration was getting past any point he could handle. His jaw clenched as tightly as possible, he did his best to breathe through gritted teeth. He felt like he was merging with Castiel's chest. Colors and lights and sounds around him inside the cage meshed together and blurred. Lightheaded and barely breathing, he was on the brink of passing out. His vision went gray and everything began tunneling. He could only focus on the flashing shades of black-white-grey-black-grey-white and the ambient whirs of Castiel's wings.
Brittle, barely holding to consciousness, Dean suddenly felt their speed slowing. He dazedly registered Castiel's palm against his forehead. Dean couldn't determine whether it was healing or simply stabilizing him, but when he landed on what felt like rocky floor made of uncut granite, he felt measurably better.
The smell hit him first as he breathed through the shock and dissipating pain. Sterile, like bleach, but it only barely concealed the raw and fetid stench underneath. The floor's edges cut into his knees and palms from his position on all fours.
Dean, Castiel's voice murmured gently in his mind, Sam is here.
Dean blinked and looked up just as a single wing spread over him, shadowing him in darkness, and continued on.
"Where are you, Cas?"
Dean's eyes drifted past the edge of the wing as it moved so he could see where he was before the wing's shadow descended.
I am with Lucifer. He cannot reach you or Sam under my wing.
Dean squinted, registering searing brilliant white and blue colors and lights along the tiled walls beyond Cas's encroaching wing. The tiles had figures on them that Dean couldn't make out.
"Be careful, Cas," Dean whispered just as he realized the figures were clowns, blood dripping from their open smiling mouths, sharp fangs extended in gaping expressions of delighted surprise. Their bulbous, flaming eyes moved and flickered as Castiel's wing drew past them and cut them from Dean's sight.
Dean's gaze moved in the same direction as the spread of Cas's wing and turned around just in time before the wing sealed him into a protective dome of pitch darkness. Dean's breath caught and his heart stopped when he saw his little brother. It was only a glimpse but it was enough; it was too much.
Sam's whole body was spread out naked, his arms and legs pinned by thin metal stakes. Every inch of him was coated in fresh red blood that shone brilliantly under the bright lights. The blood was so thick and layered on Sam that Dean almost thought he'd been skinned until he noticed his brother's hair: it was a mess and mix of dried and drying blood tangling each strand, but it was there.
Sam was laid out on a blue spongy pad about a foot thick above the floor - practically a platform - and as Dean's horrified eyes drifted back to the T-shaped pins holding Sam splayed out, he realized what this was.
Cas hadn't been specific enough to prepare Dean for this. To be fair, Cas didn't even have a frame of reference for this. How could an angel know high school biology classes dissected frogs in this manner.
And until now, Dean had thought he'd been the only one to know how much his fourteen year old kid brother had hated the curriculum. Sam had had nightmares about it, and while he refused to give details after Dean would wake him up, gasping and wheezing nearly every night, it was two months in that Sam finally admitted that the frog dissection course was maybe the root of his nightmares. Dean didn't pass over it; his intuition sharp when it came to his little brother. He'd secretly called the teacher and within a few days Sam had been serendipitously (but plausibly) reassigned. Still, it was months before the nightmares disappeared.
It was an obscure horror that Lucifer had obviously pulled out of his brother's subconscious. Just one of a series of nightmares, Dean was sure, but each just as sickening and depraved as the one before it. He wished he'd just found Sam cowering in a corner with clowns. Dean could handle clowns.
Dean didn't feel like he could handle Sam splayed and pinned out like a frog. He didn't have a choice though.
He crawled across the floor as the memory played out in his head, watching Sam's body appear again out of the darkness as Cas's wing began to glow and illuminate their surroundings with the soft blue sheen of his grace.
Get to him, Dean, Castiel said, his voice faint.
"Castiel! How much time!?" Dean roared brokenly as he reached his brother, climbing onto the blue pad.
Minutes, Castiel breathed, Lucifer-
"Save it!" Dean yelled desperately, and he heard no more.
It was completely silent under Castiel's wing except for Dean practically hyperventilating with fear and adrenaline and one other noise; a choked rattling that got louder as Dean approached and felt his brother's chest, hitching and slicked with blood. The sound was Sam trying to breathe.
"Sammy?" he whispered, tears falling over his brother's face. Shaky hands tried to wipe away the mixture of fresh and congealed blood.
Sam's chest lifted and rattled louder at the sound of his brother's voice and Dean swallowed his nausea. Sam's body shivered and his neck muscles twitched. Dean pushed his hands over Sam's face, cradling his head.
"It's okay, Sammy, I'm gonna," Dean gulped, "gonna get you out," he whispered. He took two deep breaths and looked down at his brother's body, forcing himself to triage. Blinking his tears away to see clearly, he realized the blood coating Sam's entire body seeped from superficial wounds peppered all over his skin - whip lashes, knives, burns... no deep or eviscerating incisions. No actual 'dissecting' had come to pass.
It made Dean sick to his stomach to acknowledge this was a good thing; he could've gotten to Sam at a moment where his body was so damaged - the pain so intolerable - that Sam wouldn't be capable of responding at all.
Dean huffed loudly through his lips, psyching himself up to do what he had to do. He pressed a heavy kiss against Sam's forehead, bloodying his lips and grimacing at the taste, before standing up over him.
Dean worked down-up, starting with Sam's Achilles' heels. Dean grabbed the t-shaped metal, placed his boot against Sam's ankle for leverage, and threw his strength into lifting it out.
Sam groaned and hiccupped his cries. Dean could barely hear Sam over his own stunted sobs as he moved his weight around and got his other foot free which trembled and spasmed when he was done. Sam let out a low, unconscious guttural moan before lapsing back to silence and tattered breath.
Next were Sam's thighs - pulled apart and pinned. Dean was close to throwing up with revulsion as he stepped his foot on Sam's leg just above the pin, counted to three, and roared with exertion as he pulled in one swift powerful move, lifting the pin all the way out, through the meat of Sam's thigh, and throwing it off the pad.
Sam's screams echoed and drowned out the sound of the pin clattering to the granite floor. The second pin was dispatched in the same fashion. Sam began to whisper broken, inchoate begs for mercy after screaming past his vocal chords. Bodily jerks and frantic twitches were nearing the edge of convulsions for him. He curled his mutilated legs up to his torso and twisted onto his side away from Dean.
"It's okay," Dean cried, stepping up to the next pin sliced through his little brother's hand. "Sam... Sammy, it's okay," softer this time, weeping in short, quick bursts, struggling with his own nausea and grief.
Dean steeled himself yet again, gripped the pin holding Sam's palm down and wrenched it up. Sam gasped and gagged as Dean made equally quick work of the pin stuck clear through the same arm's bicep.
Once free, Sam instinctively pulled his hand against his chest, shakily rubbing the fist up and down, almost soothingly, and Dean momentarily flashed back to Sam as a kid with mild asthma, having trouble breathing musty, polluted air and rubbing his chest up and down exactly like he was doing right now. It'd been Sam's way of relaxing and calming himself through the pain of an attack...
"Sammy c'mon, come back to me," Dean prayed aloud as he pulled around and grasped the pin stabbing through the flesh of Sam's other bicep.
"Cas?! How much time!?" Dean shouted, getting a good grip, his palms wet with blood and sweat.
Longer now, Cas responded immediately, his voice graveled, exhausted, but stronger than it had been before. Keep doing whatever you're doing, Dean, he encouraged.
With that, Dean pulled the pin and Sam's short scream transformed into wheezes and pants.
"Please," Sam rasped and Dean had never heard Sam sound like that. He squared his jaw and stepped around, tears openly falling now as he watched his little brother pull his whole body up to curl around the last pin in his palm.
Dean gritted his teeth and pushed down the desperate urge to just stop and take Sam in his arms.
"You can do this - you can do this," he huffed under his breath, shaking, "almost done." He pushed the sole of his boot down as gently as possible against Sam's wrist, edging onto the heel of his palm.
"I gotcha, Sam, I gotchya," Dean breathed, "c'mon," he said as he heaved the last pin up and out, humming loudly to stave off the sounds of Sam's last - dear God let it please be his last - piercing screams.
Dean threw the pin to the floor and collapsed to his knees, hunched over in despair, but his eyes remained on Sam's bloody form hitching labored breaths in the fetal position. Dean shook with adrenaline and took stock of his brother's beaten, tortured body.
The blue angelic hue of the room began sinking its peaceful roots into him and Dean tried to soak it in despite the sight before him. The smell - the stench - that had hit him so hard earlier had dissipated and transformed into something else without him noticing. The air was fresh and airy, an undercurrent of natural sweetness.
Dean gasped lightly and tried to swallow the lump in his throat when he recognized it: the Cleveland Botanical Gardens.
They'd told Cas after they'd seen Joshua. This scent had to have been calculated: what better way to convince Sam, even if it was subtle - even if it was unconscious - that they were good, than with the scent they both associated with God's garden? It was such a strange detail that Dean doubted Lucifer had ever used it against Sam. The thought was heartening.
He reached out to Sam, letting his fingers delicately brush over his head until they landed, steady and still, against the back of Sam's neck.
Sam shook and spasmed as if chilled by the touch, but Dean didn't back off.
"Sam," he whispered, leaning low over his brother.
Sam didn't do anything except tremble harder under the blue light of grace.
Dean inched closer on his knees. He lifted his hands above Sam again, considering, and then brought them down again onto his brother's body: one on his shoulder, the other cradling his head.
"Sammy, c'mon," he murmured, turning the kid slowly, carefully, over onto his back. Sam shuddered roughly in his arms and Dean held him as gently as possible until he could see his face.
Sam couldn't open his eyes, Dean realized. He'd thought the kid's eyes were just closed but now, under the brighter blue light now, Sam's lids were caked, glued shut by dried, reddish-black blood.
Sam vibrated with trauma, his hands curled with tremors against his chest.
"Okay, Sammy, hold still, you gotta see me," Dean said as he licked his finger and slowly, carefully pushed it against Sam's eyelids and rubbed the delicate skin, moistening and slipping the layers of crusted blood off. Sam whimpered in fear and pain, but he never made a move against Dean.
"Okay, Sammy, open up," Dean whispered, starting to pull the lid open and Sam gave a small broken sound before the eyelid practically popped up.
"That's it. Look at me, Sam. Look at me," he coaxed as Sam slowed his movements into frozen shock.
"I..." Sam gagged.
"No. Listen-"
"No. Never," Sam gurgled, then started coughing. "Fuck... you," he added between gasps as Dean pulled his arms up around his kid brother to brace him through it.
"Okay-okay-okay," Dean whispered heavily, moving his hand to stabilize the back of Sam's head.
Dean. Minutes now, Castiel imparted suddenly.
Dean closed his eyes and nodded before opening them again and staring into his little brother's single open eye. It was fiery, full of defiance, and it lit equal measures pride and terror into Dean about what it meant.
"Sammy, listen to me-"
"No-"
"No!" Dean yelled. Sam cringed and shook against him.
Dean grasped him tighter, trying to reassure, but Sam wouldn't stop shaking so Dean had to just keep going. "You are safe, do you understand me? I am your brother. I am Dean. I'm here 'cause Cas is fighting off Lucifer so we can talk right now. I can take you home. I can take you home, Sam. Okay? Let's go home, Sammy," Dean said vehemently, his voice cracking.
Sam hadn't blinked once yet even though his entire body was quaking under Dean's hold. He just stared at Dean under the blue-lit dome of Castiel's wing.
Dean licked his lips and tasted salt from his own tears.
"I've got you. You need to say yes to me and Cas right now, Sam. If you don't, none of us will get out of here."
Sam stared up at him and, for a second, Dean thought he'd gotten through. Then Sam's face contorted into sneering contempt and hatred, his lips, red with blood, peeling back to bare blackened gritted teeth.
"L-lies," Sam hissed slowly, then closed his eye. "I will... n-never..."
Dean grunted with helpless frustration. He looked around them, not knowing what to do.
Dean, Castiel called weakly.
"I don't know what to do, Cas!" Dean shouted through his own tears, clutching his brother. "He won't...Sammy?" Dean cried again, looking down at his brother. Sam jerked, as if surprised, and opened his eye again to stare into Dean's coolly. He was stubborn; steadfast, and worst of all, he clearly knew exactly what he was doing. Or what he thought he was doing.
In that moment, Dean knew without a doubt that he could not beat this. Sam was too gone to believe it was really him and too noble to break and say 'yes' to Lucifer.
So...this was it. It was time.