Once, Jimmy Novak told them that being possessed by an angel was like being chained to a comet. At the time, Sam thought it apt, the best description he'd yet had of the way Castiel flew in and out of their lives, trailing duty and destruction. He'd been so young than, which feels ridiculous to think when it was only two years ago.
Two years or two lifetimes. And an archangel living in his cells to widen the gap. There was so much Sam didn't know.
He wouldn't have called Lucifer a comet when he let him in. He was a planet, so set in his path across the universe, drawing Sam along with him like an orbiting moon. So vast that Sam could never have seen the whole surface of him. He still hasn't. They could be together another year, another two hundred years, and still, Sam won't know every crater-scarred mile of him.
Dean made a deal to drag Sam out of the Cage. Sam, and only Sam, except that Sam isn't one being anymore and hasn't been since thirty years- twenty- since the day in Stull, with the sun blinding bright as it reflected off the Impala, or maybe that was Lucifer's eyes in Sam's face. He's not sure, and Lucifer isn't either.
A package deal.
A binary star, Lucifer supplies, lazy-content-satisfied as he ever gets when Sam thinks of them as two-becoming-one. Without hesitation, he places Sam on his level, an equal partner in orbit.
Sam can always feel the gravitational pull of him. Hell, Sam's nearly suffocated in the frozen vacuum of his grace. He can't imagine Lucifer feeling the same, no matter what he says. Even overpowering him (which Lucifer grants as a turn of phrase for Sam's sake, even if they both know it isn't entirely accurate. You can't drag someone down if they go willingly.) was not a show of power. Sam is only human. He's so aware of how human he is. How human the way he loves Lucifer is.
And Lucifer loves him back. How can Lucifer love him back?
That's what Sam can't wrap his head around. He can accept that Lucifer needs him. Without him, Lucifer will return to bodies that wear thin around him, to burns opening up on his skin like the evidence of meteoroids. He can accept that Lucifer wants him, to have and to hold, kept tucked inside the core of himself where Sam would be safer from the Cage's torture (though never safe. Always comparative, because there is no sanctuary in Hell. Only brief respite. Cool fingers/feathers sliding across his soul to soothe the cracks that formed.)
How can he accept love from a creature who once swore to only dedicate that to God? How could he ever hold that?
It's not even a question of hubris. It's impracticality. It's the fact that Lucifer can call them mirrors and halves as much as he likes, but he can never change the fact that Sam was born in the mud like everyone else on Earth.
There are pictures of the Earth taken from the Moon. They make it look so small.
If you want to go to the moon, I'll take you to the moon, Lucifer offers.
Sam takes a minute to process that. It's said so casually, the way someone might offer to go to the store and pick up some milk. A planet-hopping grocery run. For an archangel, maybe not even that. The distance from the Earth to the moon the same as the dozen or so feet from the motel door to the sofa they're sitting on.
"You're missing the point," Sam says, finally.
His eyes slide across the room to where Dean isn't but would be. He keeps slipping up, talking to Lucifer out loud. It makes his brother... uncomfortable.
Lucifer drags his attention back, a bite of jealousy that's cold enough to make Sam's hair stand on end. (A disorienting reminder that while his soul is more than used to subzero temperatures, his body still shivers like anyone else's would.) Lucifer doesn't bother to hide it. Sam smiles despite himself. Maybe there are parts of Lucifer that are almost normal, almost human. He and Dean vie for the same limited resource, Sam's attention. The only reason Lucifer doesn't fight harder is because he's already won, for the most part. Sam's fingers drift back and forth across his other wrist, but he's not the one doing that.
You lack perspective, Lucifer responds.
What he says actually translates easier to we lack perspective, but they have few enough barriers between themselves without Enochian's tendency towards plural pronouns.
(When Sam talks back to him in Enochian, he says us. He says our. He says we.
In English, out loud, they become separate beings again. Me and Lucifer. Lucifer and me. It feels as foreign to Sam's tongue as the language itself.)
Everything revolves around you, Lucifer continues, and there, the plural meaning of the statement makes Sam bite back a smile.
"It doesn't," he says.
It should.
"I don't want it to." Sam notices when his fingers still.
Carefully, Lucifer amends his phrasing to I revolve around you. There's no ambiguity in his word choice. The pronouns are singular but overly formal, too. Sam's struck a nerve he didn't realize was there.
"You're the archangel," Sam protests. "It was my life that got shaped around you."
Every choice that I have made since I knew you would come into being has been about you.
(Deeper than conscious thought, where grace and soul meld into one being, whispering, some of them hurt us, we are sorry, we are forgiven, we would change nothing.)
There weren't many, Lucifer concedes. Mostly straining against the bars to get a glimpse, to know a shred of detail about you, and waiting for the day you would free me. And then... more waiting. Wishing you would come to me sooner. Knowing you wouldn't. The formality keeps the fondness out of his words that Sam aches to hear.
"You're not waiting anymore. You have what you want." Enochian sounds funny on a human tongue. It's not meant to be there. Sam tries to make it fit anyway, coaxing Lucifer back. Lucifer echoes him, what you want, what we want, we, we, we.
Sam folds his hands in his lap. It looks like he's holding hands with himself.
Lucifer is a star held inside Sam's flesh. Either he has to become something lesser than he is to fit, and Sam knows he isn't, can feel the unfathomable strain of him that somehow never pushes Sam's cells to burning, or.
Sam thinks about someone standing on the moon and reaching up to cradle the Earth's distant image in their hands. About waking up from a nightmare with Lucifer holding his face, all his power directed into making sure Sam can feel the comfort of skin-to-skin contact even when Lucifer doesn't have a body of his own.
About Lucifer getting lost inside Sam. Confused and disoriented because the Cage was built to confine him, not give him as much space as he needed and then some, not hold him in safety and warmth, not reverberate with Sam's thoughts when he gets worried and Lucifer hasn't responded to him for a few hours, leading him back to the forefront of their mind.
Lucifer is vast. Unfathomable. An archangel.
Lucifer is also Sam.
(And in that vein, Sam is also Lucifer, and Sam is still, despite everything, human.)
"You'd really take me to the moon?" Sam asks. One hand squeezes the other. One of them did that. Neither knows who. Neither cares.
Any of them, Lucifer replies, opening up a whole new galaxy of options Sam hadn't even known he could consider.
"Just the one," Sam says, keeping Lucifer from wandering too far from home.