Sam's body is not as he left it.
It should go without saying. There's a year between body and soul, or centuries between them, all depending on how you count. Of course it would change. He has come back to slightly longer hair, styled slightly different, with slightly different clothes in his bag and a slightly different set of weapons to keep at his bedside. He's been shoved back into a body with a chasm in it that his soul alone can't fill, so it rips up memories like floorboards and constructs an effigy out of them while the foundations of the house falter. He's got a vestibular system not attuned to his actual size or weight. He's got two scars on his chest that weren't there when he went to Hell.
They're long healed now. Flat. Faded. If they were less uniform, they'd fit in with all the other ones he's found since coming back.
Sam still wraps his towel up over his chest when he gets out of the shower. That's old habit. It's keeping it there that never sticks anymore. That's muscle memory. Let it drop cause he's got nothing to hide anymore, nothing that'll make Dean roll his eyes and shoot off about Sam's tits not being the ones he wants flashed at him.
Today, Sam pauses by the bathroom mirror. His hair is pressed down wet to the back of his neck, his forehead. His skin feels scrubbed raw. He makes the movement conscious today. He loosens the towel. It drops. Sam stares. He's a dog cowering at his reflection in the glass, at the strange mutt with too large teeth and claws and a body that mirrors but isn't his.
"You know your problem?" Lucifer chimes in, and Sam flinches. "You take too many things for granted." Sam can't see him in the mirror. Maybe that's some kind of mercy, that the stranger he's staring at doesn't open his mouth and speak in Lucifer's voice. "Look at you. This is everything you wanted. The weight's off your chest now. You can finally breathe." It's not a large bathroom. Lucifer's voice echoes until Sam can't tell what side he's on.
Sam wants to say something. That's a dangerous road. False idols, golden cows, and what not. What's the definition of infidelity to a jealous god? Still, Lucifer's image spins itself into Sam's vision, tempting to listen, to talk, to reach out and touch so that they can both be disappointed again. There is a chasm, and the chasm isn't new, wasn't new when he came back, wasn't new when he went in. The chasm isn't the issue. The issue is that Sam has felt it overflow. "Easier when you were soulless, huh? A glass drained is better than one half-empty." Lucifer wears sympathy badly.
Sam ignores him. He raises his fingers to his chest to sweep the scars. The recoil that travels up his arm doesn't have a place, not when the spot he doesn't want to touch isn't a part of his body anymore. There's nothing soft here, no bump bound down by whatever he could get his hands on and forced out of mind when he couldn't. He's hard muscle now. A redone tattoo. Two old scars.
"You dreamed about this," Lucifer says. He's moved into Sam's periphery, head tilted, trying to catch Sam's gaze. Sam averts his eyes. Sam's been flat-chested in his dreams since middle school. Lucifer's dream visits were to a body ideal to both of them. "I should know. I was there."
"No, you weren't," Sam says, too quick to catch and swallow. He doesn't see Lucifer smile. He hears it.
"That the hill you want to die on, Sam?" Lucifer says. Sam's arm tingles, covered in goosebumps like there's cold fingers hovering just above his skin. Lucifer can tell Sam's skin it's frostbitten and breaking off in brittle pieces, but he can't touch.
Or, he doesn't touch. One of these options is worse than the other.
"Either I really am Lucifer," he continues, "in which case, wrong." Up Sam's arm it goes, icy spider-silk caught sticking to his skin. "Or you're alone up there, and I'm you, in which case... Still wrong." Up and over Sam's shoulder, over his neck. There's no such thing as personal space when you've burrowed into someone's cells. Lucifer sighs against the shell of his ear. "You should have taken me up on my offer."
"Like you meant it," Sam whispers. He shrinks from Lucifer. There is nowhere to go. It is a very small bathroom.
"Sam." Lucifer tuts. "Now you're being unfair. I would have given you everything. The world burned for you to start fresh. As many of your friends and family to play house with as you'd like. A body that fits."
It fits now. It's well-tailored. It's flattering.
That wasn't done for him.
Sam is the invader. Sam is the soul that snatched up residency in a body that wasn't his anymore. Who had more claim, the previous tenant or the current resident? How long after saying yes, come in, make yourself at home, does the door close again? Sam didn't even stand on the doorstep and ask. He was shoved in, killed bits and pieces of himself to climb to the top, and won the game and the vessel and everything that came with it.
It could have been worse. Last time he was in a situation like that, he got stabbed in the back. He died. He's not sure what would have happened if he'd failed this time.
"You'd come back to me," Lucifer answers, like it's obvious. Sam presses down on his scar. In the corner of his eye, Lucifer wavers.
"I was going to do it eventually." First, it was once he'd run away. Then, it was after a year or two at Stanford. Then, once he'd married Jess. And then.
Between then and now, his world ended a few times. Dysphoria is small change next to the Apocalypse.
Here it is. It's done. It was done to him. Sam couldn't make time for his body, so his body carved out time for itself. It molded this vessel into something more comfortable. Difficult and frustrating compared to how Lucifer had once offered it, like a wish, like a snap of his fingers. The body resented Sam's selfishness. The body held the chasm, and the chasm was not half-empty but gaping like a wound. The body never got a chance to invite the devil in-
"But every version of you does, eventually," Lucifer finishes.
Every version of him does, eventually.
"You got to skip all the worst parts. The pain. Being a burden while you recover. The chance of regret." The parts Lucifer wouldn't have let him feel. The parts that are still stuck in Sam like shrapnel from a broken wall. Lucifer, the real Lucifer, he offered a twisted sort of comfort, a dead girlfriend who reassured Sam that she loved him, that this was all doomed from the start, that he was a monster but there was no helping that. Sam is sick from missing it. "Oh, really?" Lucifer's voice twists nastily. He leans towards Sam, a blurry scowl on the edge of Sam's awareness. Sam squeezes his eyes shut.
"What's going to make you happy, Sam? What'll it take to- Look at me!" Something cracks when Lucifer raises his voice. Sam's eyes snap open. The mirror is breaking, cutting his body up into jagged pieces. Sam's chest becomes a topographical map, his face a dozen frightened eyes. Sam jerks his head to obey Lucifer. "You say yes, and then you lock us both up," he hisses. "You get to escape, you leave me behind, and now you cry yourself to sleep because there's no archangel blanketing your soul before bed." He jabs a finger into Sam's chest. Sam flinches back.
Sam is trying to breathe. The bathroom is darker than it was before. Lucifer is bright, bright, bright, eyes lit up to burn, and Sam is choking down smoke next to him. "You get exactly the body you would have sold your soul for in another life, and you're still miserable." Sam backs up. Lucifer follows. "You don't know how to be grateful." Sam's path is obstructed. His back collides with bars. A lattice-work of frozen metal leaves it's marks upon him. "I was grateful." Lucifer reaches out a hand, and Sam tells himself he can't touch, he can't touch, he can't touch.
"I loved you," Lucifer says, his voice going so soft again, so familiar. Sam is in a half-empty vessel, and Lucifer won't touch him.
He lingers. Sam doesn't dare close his eyes or look away from him. Lucifer steps back. Sam is no longer caged against the wall. He doesn't move.
"Appreciate what you've got while you're up here, Sammy," Lucifer says, voice back to jovial mockery, "because when you're done, I doubt I'll still feel the same." He looks Sam up and down. "But at least you don't have to worry about your body in Hell, right?" Sam digs into his scar again, harder. Lucifer disappears. Sam has a sinking feeling that these two things weren't actually related.
He stays pressed to the bathroom wall, gulping down air. His chest rises and falls with each lungful, the inescapable reality of the flesh he's wrapped in. He's not sure how long it is until he bows down to pick up his fallen towel. It's damp. He looks back at the mirror. It's still cracked. He extends a finger and runs it over the glass, feeling the smooth surface beneath. Still, he sees fractures.