Fic: Heathen Song (1/1)
Title: Heathen Song
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Sam Winchester, Michael, Lucifer, Dean Winchester
Word Count: 8,008
Summary: The thing you have to understand, is that only three souls in all of Creation have ever seen the Cage, and it’s absolutely nothing like Sam Winchester would have guessed. Or: how soulmates survive as half of themselves. Spoilers through 6.11 - Appointment in Samarra.
Disclaimer: I own nothing but the plot. Everything That Rises Must Converge belongs to Flannery O’Connor.
Author’s Notes: Inspired by various commentaries on the stories of Judas Iscariot, the Fall of Lucifer, the general concept of ‘soulmates’, a few amorphous ideas, stream-of-consciousness, and Flannery O’Connor: this is an experiment in style that may or may not have succeeded, with a premise that’s, admittedly, a bit of a stretch. Mostly implicit, intentionally vague at times, and most certainly self-indulgent -- consider it a bit of... blasphemous creative exegesis in fic form; I love pondering and playing with traditional interpretations way too much to have simply let this go without at least trying.
Also, disregarding some pieces of 5.16 specifically that don’t quite add up with this pseudo-AU would probably be helpful.
Heathen Song
i.
The thing you have to understand, is that even demons can’t lie about what they’ve never seen. You have to understand that people can talk about what they haven’t known, but they can’t talk true; and seeing might not mean believing, in the end, but it’s sure as hell more reliable than the alternative.
The thing you have to understand, is that only three souls in all of Creation have ever seen the Cage.
For all they’d talked about it, feared it and wondered what it was, there hadn’t been a second, not a moment between weighted breaths where Sam’s heart hadn’t shivered, hadn’t throbbed with the terror, with the leaden promise of the pain that would await him. From the first thought, the first glimpse of an answer, a way to set everything right, to put it all to an end -- from the very first inkling, he’d envisioned it, watched it in his nightmares: darkness and soot and fire and death, all bones on the streets and blood in the water, soul-blackness lining the rungs of the bars that would hold him, sin and loss spun in his chains. He’d imagined agony, he’d imagined the worst and then he’d steeled for something even deeper, even more steeped in wrath, and he’d dared to hope for a mercy he didn’t deserve -- was smart enough, bleak enough to know he’d feel every crack, every cut and bruise, every vessel and vein crushed and every dying beat in him, every ounce of torment for eternity. He’d feel it all.
So he’d tried to steel himself for the inevitable, for the incomprehensible -- he’d try to picture the unintelligible in the center of his mind, but he could never have prepared for the reality; he could never have know what was waiting for him.
He could never have dreamed that the Cage was made of Light.
The first thing he knows is that there was no fall, no endless drop into nothingness, carved into chasms and space: he remembers his brother’s blood and the slow drift of his eyes sliding closed, and he remembers turning, tipping backward from the ankles, momentum as he grabbed the body that came at him, dragged it along and sealed fates as he curled, loose-limbed, and gave way -- succumbed.
He remembers bracing for the lurch, the pull in his gut as the bottom fell out, as his equilibrium shifted, started, shattered; he remembers the way his muscles clenched in anticipation as he watched the sky disappear, swallowed up in soil as he choked, went blind. He remembers motion, only because it didn’t last, he remembers pressure because as soon as he returned to himself -- as soon as reality shifted and righted, aligned to a new gravity, a new rotation and spin -- there was no grip on his arm, no nails dug red, bit bright against his skin.
There is nothing from above, down below.
And as it settles, the only fall that comes is when his eyes slip open to see his toes, bare skin on virgin white, solid nothingness and cool beneath the soles of his feet; the only fall comes when he gasps and loses his balance, when he slumps forward on his knees, dead weight against the ground. The only flinch comes when he takes in the brightness, when he yields against a glare that threatens, envelopes: embraces and condemns. The only lurch comes when he looks upward, sees tears that fall on the transient ceiling, transparent in places, patches of darkness left behind, abandoned as the light moves, dances in shifting patterns that cannot stay, don’t seem to want to -- the only lurch that comes wrenches hard at the heart of him, smatterings of feeling that he can’t connect to, can’t reach for, but that he knows, innately, are more his own than the prints of his fingers, than the blood in his veins.
The only sound comes from the rasp of his own breath, and he stares, blinks: every direction is painted in monochrome, the shades of his own form like scars on a canvas, too bold, too brash against the light. His lungs stretch, rush -- too fast, and it should burn; the air is thin, if it’s air at all -- scarce and cool and dry, and it should sear with every gasp, every pant as it all narrows, all comes in as spirals, folds and swims too fast.
He’s alone, except he isn’t; there’s no one, and yet he can feel the eyes on him, can feel the pull from above like something hard and heavy at the center of his chest, anchored in his ribs.
He is alone, and goddamnit, it should hurt like hell, but it doesn’t.
Not yet.
ii.
The soft pad of his feet, the suck-and-rush of simply breathing in and out and in: it all fades into the periphery, after a time, and there’s nothing to tap against the artificial silence that seeps into the gaps, a trick of the mind -- there’s nothing, for what Sam suspects might be a very long time, might be the space between heartbeats he can’t always feel, can’t always hear against the din of emptiness: waves reverberating ceaselessly, to the edge of forever and beyond.
And so it cuts sharp, harsh in the marrow when the sound comes, a snarl; he hears it, long before the lighting stutters and the shadows gather, cower before the Dawn and Sam sees it, the thing that makes the noise, holds the keys: it shifts between human and animal, demon and Grace, the man to the monster to the devil in the deep, the angel on high, one to the next between blinks of an eye, and Sam stops, watches as the creature, the venom, as Lucifer himself comes for him once again -- doesn’t bother with permission as he charges, teeth bared, unleashed.
There’s a flash, slow manipulation of photons and something higher, something otherworldly in this place, and there are wings -- tattered and visceral, magnificent: brighter and bigger than any Sam’s ever seen -- and when Satan lunges forth, Sam doesn’t dare to breathe, doesn’t need to; he feels the solidity of himself, his form collapse and give on impact, watches as Lucifer passes through him, aimless, untouched, and tumbles lightly to the ground, slack-jawed as he gapes up at Sam; beyond Sam.
Sam feels it before he notices, can verify it in any real way -- he feels presence at his shoulder and the displacement of matter and time bending around his consciousness as Michael strides forward: solemn, dangerous, expression shifting with faces that catch in facets, pieces of identities, shells stolen and spent.
It’s ironic, unthinkable: Sam had almost forgotten they were here, in this place; he’d almost forgotten all of the hows and the whys, until this very moment, until just now.
And the two of them, the brothers -- they stare, just stare: eyes of Light murderous as the Soldier stands his ground, mourns the loss, and it’s not enough, not nearly enough -- and Sam thinks that somewhere inside him, he knows that what he’s feeling, the heavy churn at his center like malice and decay; he knows that it’s nothing compared to real grief, honest suffering -- it’s a pale imitation of what he knows is stirring in his soul, beneath his awareness, outside his control.
He knows; and that’s almost sufficient, almost good enough.
There’s a long stretch of silence in which eons pass and lives are bought and drained; a war raged before the end, the victor sworn: Lucifer retreats like a frightened child -- and maybe, just maybe, that’s exactly what he is underneath all of the posturing and pretense. But there is no winner, here, only degrees of loss and strength and calloused wills against the fray -- blood and sweat and seedy, quiet throes, festering: and angels, they know how to hold a grudge, know how to stoke dying flames to fire again, let it spark and surge and fade.
“There’s nowhere to run, Samuel,” and it’s then that Sam realizes Michael’s attention has shifted to him; that Sam sees that Michael’s moved at all, and Sam wonders, idly, when he became a coward -- he doesn’t remember, it’s been too long.
“There’s no need for you to flee from me.” Maybe Michael comes close first, or maybe Sam heels like a trained beast -- it’s all the same, and Michael radiates heat in proximity, all the rage of a blaze. “Not anymore.”
Sam doesn’t think before he questions it, doesn’t even know if the doubt forms, if the suspicion takes hold: he doesn’t trust, except the clench in his gut -- and Michael understands it, reads it first.
“What could I do to you?” Michael asks, mournful -- quiet wrath. “What more could I take from you?” He looks Sam up and down, must see something in him, through him, on him as he shakes his head and curves his lips, grim: “I know an exercise in futility when I see one.”
Sam does bother to wonder if anything but futility exists here; exists anywhere.
“Do you know why I built this cage from Light alone?”
Sam doesn’t nod, doesn’t move; feels cold.
“Self-preservation,” Michael smiles around the words, like they’re fond, like they sear deep enough, slow enough to warm first, burn later. “Lucifer has far too high an opinion of himself, of his own importance. He’d destroy us all with a thought, if he could.” The smile turns melancholy, and Sam tastes bitter blood at the back of his throat -- betrayal as he knows it, can compare and connect to the deed. “Compassion and sentiment aside -- if we stood in his way, we wouldn’t stand long.”
Sam remembers sneaking out of motel rooms, straining plasma into bottles and sneaking hits after dark, across state lines -- Sam remembers deception and rage, sad eyes and a tightness in his chest, and maybe he is like Lucifer: more than is forgivable, more than can be redeemed.
“But himself,” Michael continues, less for Sam now; never for Sam to begin with; “that was the only thing he would never destroy.”
Michael lets himself absorb the brightness, lets his surroundings dim, allows himself ascend in every way he still can -- not enough. “Lightbringer,” he resonates, permeates, a confession to no one. “It kept him in,” and he runs hands that span continents against the confines, the prison walls; “but it kept him safe, as well.” Michael stills, loses something in the process as he whispers, stricken: “The one thing he wouldn’t destroy.”
For a moment, fleeting, Sam wishes he were made of Light.
“Keeping yourself safe, though,” Michael recovers after a beat, wry, detached -- enviable for it; “sometimes it comes back to bite you in the ass.”
Michael spins around in an instant -- Sam can’t follow the motion, not that it matters. “Because it’s not in the cards to be fulfilled, Sam,” he preaches, humorless mirth in his voice, not his eyes. “You can’t fight City Hall and expect to withdraw unscathed.”
And Sam doesn’t know what it means, but he thinks there’s something behind it, feels it shiver in his bones like a bad joke in the passenger seat when they’re running on fumes.
“You of all people should understand it,” Michael turns on him, turns away, leaving him exposed. “I loved my brother.” And it’s a crack in the pavement: breakable, paralyzing, step after step as it deepens, grips and pulls.
“Beyond everything he did, and everything he’ll do,” Michael says, and Sam’s heard the words without so many words; knows already how they’ll end; “beyond all things unforgivable, I love him.”
No one deserves that much; no one has ever earned a gift like that.
And Sam had never seen it, never known it; has seen and known and never cared, not enough.
Sam looks to the sky, to the ground, to the Light: looks everywhere, long, and gives himself an excuse -- too late -- to be blind.
iii.
As time passes -- as much as it can in this place - there’s a shift in things that Sam hadn’t been paying any mind to; and he almost misses it entirely, for the fact that his mind is elsewhere, steeped in blankness and fog.
It turns out that Michael’s the more decent of them, if ‘decent’ is even a word that can be used to describe a murderous warrior of God. But as Sam comes down from the clouds, stops losing himself so quickly in the radiance, against the waves -- stops letting it seep into him instead of enveloping him from the outside, starts owning it and calling it home -- there’s a precarious sort of common ground between the two of them, like ice on concrete, or walking on water. Michael appears at intervals, too often, too fleeting, and he’ll speak sometimes, brood others -- relive tales of the heavens and the earth, war and peace, pain and joy. They mean nothing, and Sam only half-listens, lets it mostly serve as white noise to fill the gaps and ease the longing; he tries not to grasp onto the sentiments, the songs of family and feeling that seek to grab out, latch onto him and pull him down fast, hard.
Sam’s come this far, fallen this low: he doesn’t want to find what lies beneath.
“I’m not trying to manipulate you, you know,” Michael tells him once in passing, never looks in his direction. “I’m not sowing seeds in your mind for my amusement.”
Sam closes his eyes and pictures a stone skipping across the water; wonders if he threw it, or if he is, in essence, the stone.
“You don’t have to question my motives,” Michael presses on, and Sam wonders if the angel glances toward him only when he isn’t watching, when Sam can’t see. “Because there are no motives to be had.”
“Angels are communal beings, you understand.” And for a moment, Sam wonders about Heaven, the greater, overarching reality of it, versus the smaller ones, the personal slices of paradisiacal bondage -- wonders what it means to be holy. “Here, I am bereft, cut off from the Host,” and it sounds almost sordid, and Sam almost remembers of himself: curled up on a stained dorm-room mattress, no sheets or pillows, just a cell phone in his hand with a familiar number lit up, never dialed; “I speak to you for my own benefit.”
Sam tries to remember when talking every solved anything; when its absence saved him any pain.
“You don’t have to fear me, here,” Michael says casually, a little degrading, mocking in his own way - Sam doesn’t make eye contact with him when he can avoid it, either, but it’s not because he’s afraid.
That doesn’t stop him from flinching, though, from holding a breath in, sharp -- shaved glass inside of lungs he doesn’t feel until they’re filled -- when Michael swipes a demonstrative arm toward, through Sam’s form, barred from contact, from striking true; proving his point with a smirk. “I couldn’t harm you if I tried.”
Sam lets the air out slow, and feels hollow - incomplete.
“When we find our way out, though,” Michael continues, glancing out into the ether, as if he can discern meaning in the endless, formless void; “you’d be wise to watch your back.”
He says when like he means it, intends it without irony; he makes his promise like he’ll keep it.
Sam notices his heart only in the beating; it thuds hard with the threat.
iv.
There are moments - fleeting instances, like a storm in the dark, lightning striking and revealing life against the black, a precious moment before it recedes; there are moments that are the exact opposite, where the light parts, the white separates, refracts into colors and shapes to reveal secrets, to show things that ache and claw and grab hold, that put weight to Sam’s form, that pull gravity against him and remind him which way is up: the way where he’s missing.
There are moments when Sam sneaks glimpses through the bars.
He sees a figure, this time -- silhouette cut dark, stiff, laid black from behind; watching through a window, just like Sam where he stands: a woman, a child, and Dean.
Dean.
The world sparks around him, the Cage rattles and Sam crumbles, folds down to his knees -- there’s the phantom impression of pain that almost breaks him worse than the real thing, muscle memory and sheer suffering impaling him, assaulting him from all sides and he trembles, fingernails grounding him and cutting into his palms. He can feel the skin break without the sting, and Sam is in flux, in transit, rendered and cast down, smote on the rocks -- he is everywhere and nowhere, and his gaze is fixed twice on the very same thing, and there’s no explanation, no understanding; there’s Dean, and there’s nothing, and there’s breeze along the block, and then the lamppost at his back as it flickers and blows, dies, and the darkness expands there as the light draws together here, there, here -- and Sam’s on his back and on his feet and all he sees is Dean, people and places and Dean in the afterimages, burned behind his eyes.
Like an omen, Lucifer is behind him, and the light swirls with him, a command as Sam feels the burn in his eyes start to lessen, give way to a sting; there’s a bitter taste in his mouth, behind his teeth, and he can see himself for the first time in Lucifer’s eyes, reflected -- his own gaze black, all diamonds and coal; there’s blood on his upper lip, like it maters if it flows, and there’s a chill, a shiver, like dew before dawn at the center of the sun -- and the walls aren’t walls, and the walls don’t end, but when Lucifer laughs, cackles; when Lucifer laughs, it echoes, vibrates, boils in his bones.
And the echo: it’s endless.
Sam squints his eyes closed, wills away the dark with more dark, and when the sound stops he looks again, sees Michael where Lucifer stands -- bright and looming, a menace drawn in grace, and Lucifer is diminished in the glow, somehow: dampened.
“Don’t forget, Samuel,” Michael sneers down at him, but there’s a gravity to it, a regret as he doesn’t look so much at Sam as he stares instead at his own brother, his own hardened heart. “This is Hell, as much as anywhere.”
Sam only knows that there are tears in any of it, for any of it, because of the light - the way it catches in currents and waves against the wetness on his lashes, reflects blindness and bitterness and loss back into him, sears it hard and settles deep.
v.
He makes a habit, then, of watching the shadows; tries to make them out again, tries to make sense of the shapes - it’s a game, almost, except there’s no pleasure in it, no way to win, no loss to suffer and bring about its end: futile, all of it, and Sam sighs, thinks of long, lazy afternoons caught between chaos, sprawled loose-limbed across the trunk, the roof, the hood of the Impala with sun-warmed metal, frost-chilled glass on the back of his neck, watching clouds and stars and the direction of the wind.
He never appreciated those moments enough, those reprieves. He almost wishes he had the chance to go back; almost would, if he could, except that he doesn’t know if he’s strong enough to survive it all twice.
He doesn’t startle at the presence at his shoulder; if he lets himself sink far enough inside his own mind, Sam can see the resemblance, at the surface; can comprehend why they were chosen, why they were destined -- he can imagine it’s his brother filling that space.
“You know what Hell is.”
Hell is hearing that voice, those words, and not Dean’s.
“Hell is severance,” Michael says as Sam breathes out, heavy; “mind, body, and soul. Hell is division, absence.”
“Hell is separation from what which you love with your deepest self,” Michael murmurs like a verdict, a sentence; “in the image of the Divine.”
And then he looks at Sam, locks gazes and pierces to the only part of him that really survives here, that matters at all; holds tight so it’ll listen, fast so it won’t fall.
“Hell is what steals away that which you love more than your own soul.”
And the grip is gone around him, the subversive sense of being bound, but Sam’s still gasping; the hard press of it all remains, closing in.
“I assume you’ve devised how this works?” Michael gestures around them, and Sam can’t string it all together, not just yet; he follows, but he can’t retrace the steps.
“No death, here. No decay,” Michael smile softly to himself, sad; “A taste of the home he forsook,” he recites, a long-practiced refrain, aloof as he tilts his chin skyward and lifts up his eyes.
“No violence, no physical harm.” And Michael moves to bring a hand across Sam’s face, wrap a fist around his throat, but he can’t, won’t -- stops short even if it doesn’t matter, lets a palm hover, cupped to the shape of Sam’s cheek, and Sam knows that Michael isn’t seeing him, is elsewhere on his own.
“The only pain known within these walls is here,” and Sam can almost feel the pressure of his touch, the way Michael’s hand trails down to his center of his chest, meaningful. “And that’s the curse inside the gift, really. The balance between the scales.”
Sam thinks maybe he does understand it; maybe it’s something in him as thick as blood, as deep as grace -- as woven into who and what he is as anything, as fierce as death and guilt and love. He thinks he understands.
Sam misses his brother like a limb; the heart between his lungs.
vi.
Focus, feeling -- it’s all peripheral here, it all loses meaning. Sam’s attention wanders, and whole lifetimes might happen that he doesn’t quite notice -- he can’t imagine time, or the way it used to pass: it all seems superfluous, and very far away.
He doesn’t notice anything until it changes -- and maybe it’s always been that way, maybe it’s never changed: maybe he’d put his heart into the wrong things and only noticed they were black once everything else had fallen away. Maybe it’s fate, or maybe he failed somewhere, fell of his own accord -- maybe it’s just the way all stories end, the place that all paths lead to.
Sam doesn’t notice anything until it’s far too late.
So when Lucifer appears before him -- emerges, takes shape out of the Light, his birthright, Sam’s rendered senseless, mindless; he’s beautiful, hideous: a holocaust in motion, and Sam sees it, will see it always, just behind his eyes -- flickering, real in ways he can’t comprehend, beyond his capacity to capture and to hold.
And like a serpent, a coil of temptation and regret, Lucifer circles him, studies him, watches him -- sees around and through, eyes narrowed if they’re even eyes: sightless and never-blinking, omniscient, a remnant of the holy at his core.
“I underestimated you,” and the voice isn’t one that Sam’s ever heard with his own ears, nothing he knows outside of his own mind -- it’s the same pitch and tone he’s heard in his nightmares, the same saccharine slip of syllables that sends him shivering, that has promised the universe and torn his world apart. It’s he whisper of the Devil clawing at his heart, and Sam follows him, turns as he turns; tries to steel himself, tries to hold himself steady if he can do nothing else, manage nothing more.
“When you gave in,” Lucifer says it, slow; a recollection from long ago, “when you said yes,” and he moves too fast, dizzying, impermanent: “at first, I expected a struggle.”
And something floods, something rushes forth and fills in all the empty places Sam had forgotten, the things that had seemed distant and faint in the ether -- something takes them in and seeps away, erodes them further, deeper, and leaves him that little bit more hollow in the losing, takes him that much closer to caving in as Lucifer smiles, surveys.
“I expected resistance,” Lucifer presses on, “but your soul was so broken, your heart was so black,” and he sounds giddy, and the lead sinks hard inside Sam at the sound: “you were like Christmas morning, Sammy.”
And fuck, but Sam can feel newsprint against his skin, letters rubbed off on sweat, classifieds and colors on his fingers as he unwraps barbie dolls and bullets, skin mags at the tender age of ten, and he tastes eggnog and too much alcohol like it’s real, like it’s right there, and he doesn’t know whether it’s worse to remember or forget in that moment, doesn’t know how to hide from everything about himself that was ever worth holding on to.
“Your hollow, rotting carcass, your rancid human husk, all just waiting for me,” Lucifer keeps on, keeps digging, tearing the layers back and skinning him, wasting him, but Sam knows better: he’s not sure what’s left to ruin. “And you; you gave in like you were waiting for it, begging for it, and I believed it.” He sounds almost rueful. “I let down my guard.”
And Sam was begging, in his way -- he can admit that now; but there’s nothing to lose anymore, there’s nothing to take, and Sam’s sick of running, sick of waiting and bowing and giving in. He’d failed the first time around; he’ll write his own destiny below the surface of the earth, on a plane of existence only he will ever see.
It might not prove anything; it might just be enough. “Fuck off, you son of a bitch.”
“Feisty!” Lucifer laughs, all acid and soot. “But that’s not just you in there talking, is it Sam?”
And Lucifer’s eyes glow as he says it, dying stars, and Sam knows before he knows, feels the elusive tug of being and becoming, momentum running the length of him, undimmed.
“It used to be that you could separate it, that you could see it like a braid, the black and the white,” Lucifer crosses fingers, demonstrative, and there’s a twist in Sam, at the center of him: something spiraled, twined -- something separate, but no less known; “where your brother curled up into you.”
And Sam breathes hard, dry and heavy -- knows in that moment whose touch keeps him whole; always has.
“It’s all jumbled now, shadows and highlights, shades of grey.” And Lucifer reaches out, waves a hand around him, maybe runs straight through whatever passes for a body in this place, whatever masquerades as the frame: transcending dimensions and redefining truth, and Sam thinks maybe it’s ludicrous, maybe it’s the only tenable notion left between this world and the next -- he feels empty but solid, tethered and unchained -- torn in between.
“It’s part of why I hate your precious big brother so much,” Lucifer leads him on, goads him; drops crumbs that taste of ash. “Thought admittedly, part of it was just because he’s an arrogant bastard with a stubborn streak that, quite frankly, cramps my style,” and Sam lets the warmth of it settle, the way that it’s true and it’s beautiful, and Sam misses it with everything that’s left in him.
“But what really got me,” and Lucifer shakes his head like it wasn’t the world ending, wasn’t a life rending, wasn’t a heart breaking; “was that no matter how hard I tried, no matter how much of me erased every inch of you, your brother held on.
And Sam knows it’s true, still wonders why: “Your brother kept faith.”
“Your brother,” Lucifer spits, and Sam lets his vision blur, dim for a moment -- lets himself relish the thought of it, the ability to see Dean in his mind’s eye, the memory that’s there, and it’s better to have that than nothing, it’s better.
“Your brother, against all attempts to prove the contrary, was righteous, god damn him,” Lucifer curses, execrates flesh and blood as he roars, explosive; “and he wouldn’t let you go.”
When it happens, it wrenches like a revelation, an imperative -- buried deep, unquenchable: a spark that shoots across and leaves nothing sacred, the scent of Dean beneath motel soap and aftershave: in the way Sam moves because it’s a two-step, a give and a take, in the rhythm of his lungs and the way he’d wake before dawn and rest before midnight when they could; would fill the silence between someone else’s breaths: and from the day he was born, arms that belonged to another were as close as his own, steadying his steps without a touch, saving him from the fire from miles, from moments away.
Sam’s heart feels heavy in a chest he can’t place -- he’s never been alone in his entire life.
“Did you really think it was a plastic soldier and a glint in the eye that let you wrestle back control?” Lucifer asks, incredulous and mocking as he croons, sneers. “A single soul in two bodies, Sam. Two souls fused to one.”
The voice that comes to mind floats across a bar in the world, far beyond -- beer stench and dim lights: Winchesterland. Special cases. Like soulmates.
Jesus Christ.
“Don’t tell me you didn’t know, Sammy,” Lucifer watches, doesn’t smile, but it’s all condescension, sadistic satisfaction condensed, made to burn. “You’re not all here.” And Sam knows it now, like everything he’d ever believed was only half right, everything he’d ever thought only half-formed, and he hurts for all the missing pieces, the parts he thoughtlessly, carelessly cast aside.
“But the best part,” and it’s the end of an equation, a balance and a need -- Sam can’t accept it, but there is nothing else: all the lies in the world can’t untangle them, and Sam’s afraid of what real loneliness means, now that he understands he’s never felt it full.
“The real kicker, is that dearest Dean’s not all...” Lucifer points a finger, innocent, terrible, toward a sky that means too much: “there.”
And it hits Sam, harder than a gunshot, quicker than a shock: Dean’s tears on the steering wheel, blind roads; Dean’s wrists shaking his grip on a hammer; Dean’s knees on dead soil, staring blank, like he can’t remember who died here, can’t recall what was lost; Dean’s eyes like Styx, not soulless but deadened, bereft -- a hand on the back of Sam’s body, a cheek next to a familiar face, an embrace that Sam knows is false, too true, and it’s too weak, lacking heart, the way his weathered, broken brother clutches to Sam’s body: and that’s what breaks him, that’s what makes it all cave in.
“That’s what half-a-soul looks like, Sam,” and he can see it, can imagine it just so, “walking around in the flesh.”
Sam’s never seen something so wrong.
“I suppose it’s preferable to the alternative, though,” Lucifer baits him, reads his thoughts. “I’m afraid your meat-suit’s been getting up to all sorts of mayhem upstairs, while you’ve been killing time here in the basement.”
The images in Lucifer’s eyes shift to reds and blacks and greys: gunmetal and blood, wholesale slaughter, and Sam’s glad for a moment, before it all starts to slot into place, that he’s already in hell, that he can’t be punished for it twice -- he’s glad until he catches glimpses, the shell of himself next to the the mockery of his brother that goes through the motions and keeps breathing ‘cause he can; until he realizes that he’s connected to something strong, unbreakable, strung close to his brother’s will and maybe that’s what keeps him just this side of sane -- but Dean’s been driven into the ground, run ragged: Dean’s burning from the inside, and there’s no way to stop it, no way to explain, and Sam; Sam can’t even say he’s sorry, can’t try to make amends.
“That’s what you said yes to, Sam,” Lucifer confirms, condemns. “That’s what you did.”
Maybe it’s different, maybe it’s the same -- maybe it’s as wrong and wretched as everything he did on the surface, in life: but it all comes back at once, all bowls into him and sucks him dry, takes what he should have been giving all along until it’s all gone, and it still isn’t enough.
“That’s what damnation looks like,” Lucifer murmurs, blinks until Dean is like a real figment, a solid vision there with them, and it hurts because it’s true; but not only. “Like hate twisted into need, into,” and Dean is gone before the word comes, ill-fitted, a blasphemy; “love, so it cuts all the more.”
“A fate worse than death, I promise you.” Sam thinks maybe Lucifer should have told him this story before, when he’d been trying so hard to gain Sam’s sympathy, earn his trust; because Sam feels it, agony: bonds as they stretch and break.
“Hate can ravage you, ruin you,” Lucifer snarls, but it doesn’t draw blood, falls flat: he’s empty underneath, and maybe that’s what ties them, makes them both the same. “But I went mad inside this place.”
And they’re not talking about here and now and him, anymore -- they’re not talking at all, and Sam sees Dean, sees Jess and his parents and his family and his failings in every flicker, every syllable, every blink and confession.
“I lost everything to the Cage, because my brother loved me,” and there’s so much said, so much surrendered, and Sam just wishes Lucifer could rip him, limb from limb, and let him bleed, let it end. More than anything, he wishes that.
“And that’s on you this time, Sammy,” Lucifer barely murmurs, barely says. “That’s on you.”
And there’s despair in him, a wash of it, debilitating, and for the first time since he fell, came here; for the first time, the light ebbs, and everything, for a blissful space, goes black.
vii.
He can’t let it go, afterward. All the connections, all the what-ifs and maybes, too many loose ends that could mean so much more now, that could be read deeper and brighter and stronger with the word on his tongue, in its light.
Soulmates.
In the stark sheen of revelation, everything regains its sharpness, reclaims its solidity -- heavier in the knowing, the feeling -- and Sam sees things clearer, grasps a little bit more of Heaven and Hell, of his heart and his mind, his soul, his brother’s. He thinks he’s ready when Michael comes to him again -- except he isn’t.
“You understand now, don’t you,” Michael asks, commands, and San almost does, but doesn’t; not yet.
And it’s instantaneous, inescapable; it’s truth written in the eyes, flashes and shades: he’s 11 years old and it’s his first Thanksgiving, except this time he’s nauseous at the dinner table, and he doesn’t bother to make the lie convincing when he runs: his dad’d be ashamed, but his stomach’s roiling and he barely makes it half-way down the street before he feels faint, hurls in hedges trimmed too short, too nice as he stumbles down sidewalks and roadsides, quick as he can, off-balance, lucky no one swerves wrong and turns him into roadkill. It takes a good fifteen minutes to pick the lock once he gets to their room -- Dean’s gone, and Sam doesn’t even bother to worry about the shit-storm that’ll hit once he gets back; just crouches there on the scum-encrusted bathroom floor, dead-halves of insects lodged in the tile-creases, his throat on fire, no telling sweat from tears on his cheeks. He doesn’t know how long it takes before the door swings open on its hinges and Dean’s there, all lanky half-grown limbs and pimples, crumpled learner’s papers sticking out of his back pocket; his eyes wild, frantic, angry until they settle on Sam, clutching porcelain for dear life.
“Christ, Sammy,” Dean hisses, and Sam catches in the background the things Dean doesn’t say, knows Sam’s already sorry for -- leaving without an explanation, disappearing without a trace, making Dean worry, wasting the family-size bucket from KFC that Dean wouldn’t have touched, because he’d been running around looking for his brother.
He cleans Sam up without a word, rough cloths and lukewarm water on his face, and Sam shivers for something bigger than the cold as Dean leads him to the bed they share; probably shouldn’t, small as it is, but that’s never mattered, and Sam doesn’t want it to start just now.
“Sleep it off, Sammy,” and Dean doesn’t have to say any more, ask any less; his voice is deep where Sam’s forehead settles, falls into the hollow of his chest, and the last thing he remembers of the entire ordeal is the smell of fried chicken, familiar in the stale motel air as fingers brush the bangs from his skin and feel slow for a fever, cool in the night.
Sam blinks, and Michael’s staring, watching, affirmation where Sam knows he looks lost at sea; he thinks of Heaven, of bullets in his chest and waking in the dark, the feel of being off-balance on his own, sharing eternity with someone who was missing, until he was found again, until they came back together and Sam reclaimed his center and the world and everything after felt right.
“He was spared,” Michael whispers, uncharacteristically gentle; “Dean’s soul was saved, Sam, and it would have kept yours close. But even so, you were promised elsewhere.”
And Sam shudders, afraid of the only place that this can go.
“You were always destined for Hell.”
And he’s older, taller, and he’s watching Flagstaff wake outside the grimy windows of the room he’s squatting in, tossing empty wrappers on the floor -- and it’s freedom, sure, but freedom’s hard and it lodges in his throat all tight; and freedom’s lonely, and Bones the dog is old, frail, and he died just before Dean came, and Sam cried when it happened, probably still had the tear-streaks on his dirty cheeks when Dean burst through the door and dragged him home, wrathful, and the pizza’d tasted like cardboard, the Funyuns were stale, the Mr. Pibb flat, and Sam couldn’t sleep without the sound of another body, another life -- one in particular, buzzing and humming and being, right at his side.
“My Father works miracles, sometimes,” Michael explains, still soft; “he can grant mercy in the most unlikely of places. You were in Heaven, sworn to its opposite; and you know what Hell is,” he prompts, and yeah: Sam knows.
Hell is separation from what you cherish at your core, in your deepest self; Hell is what steals away that which you love more than your own soul.
The night Sam leaves for Stanford is the night that everything changes, the night when something breaks inside of him that never remembers how to stitch back together. He misses orientation, and his first week of classes; doesn’t know how to keep time or balance on his own, not at first. It’s everything he thought he wanted, that he’d fooled himself into thinking it would fix something, would right every wrong, except all he’s left with is a dorm that reeks of beer and piss beneath cleaning solution and cheap detergent, a duffle filled with only the things that were replaceable, the things he didn’t need, and a worn Flannery O’Connor paperback that means the world to him, came from a bookstore in New Orleans out of his brother’s poker winnings at a bar he was too young to drink in, cloodstained on the edges of the pages halfway through from a paper-cut, a sacrifice, a piece of what he can’t let go of, can’t let himself forget.
“You were spared the pain of your Hell,” Michael tells him, but it’s too far to hear it beneath the thrumming, the hiss in Sam’s ears; “you saw your damnation as a lie, sweeter, less harrowing -- the stories retold to seem tender, treasured, your greatest hits.” Michael smiles, reminiscent, but it cuts Sam to the bone.
“Your Heaven was hidden from you, where your brother walked,” and Sam knows in that moment that angels can feel, can be cruel and be kind all at once: “and your perdition was eased in the trade.”
The city smells of smog, but not in here -- the Botanical Gardens are warm, fragrant, all rose-water and moss, and Dean had forged the permission forms, had masked his voice as best he could when he called himself in sick so he could come with, keep an eye on Sam for the trip, and Sam had been grateful -- too young to question how much he wanted Dean with him, to think twice about the comfort of Dean’s eyes on his back, Dean being there at any moment to rescue him, to keep him out of trouble, safe from harm.
It doesn’t take long before Sam gets lost in all the green, stops in an outcropping of hibiscus blooms to catch his breath, stare off and find no one familiar, nothing he knows, and he’s small enough, dwarfed enough by the world to cry for it, to make himself tiny in the corner and despair until there’s a hand on his neck and an arm around his shoulders, and Dean’s chest is there, right there, and he buries his face at the center and shakes away his fear with the knowledge that always, always, his brother’s going to find him, bring him home.
And it all comes together, revealed in good time -- it’s not hard to see the ties that bind, the threads weaving through the tapestry of Sam’s damnation as it was lived, as it was known: they’re all missing one thing, in the very same place, and they all only end when it returns.
When he returns.
Sam fights for balance as it all comes to the fore, as he remembers Dean’s words, so broken as they followed The Road in the Sky: Your Heaven is somebody else’s Thanksgiving.
Sam wants to laugh until he sobs, wants to sob until he runs dry; wants to tell Dean it’s not true, not real, not ever; not quite.
“Sometimes,” Michael says, close at hand, near to him -- almost warm, almost a comfort; “what we want is easier to face than what we need.”
Sam’s tears dry in the heat, stick longer, salt and grieving on his skin, on Dean’s, one and the same, struck in his soul.
Their soul.
viii.
Sam doesn’t see anything more, after that. Doesn’t see his brother, doesn’t lose himself in regret -- doesn’t have to, because regret is everywhere, and Sam floats on a whim of redemption, wonders how long he has to rot before absolution comes.
He doesn’t see Lucifer, not anymore.
Michael comes and goes; it feels as if maybe they’re all tired, maybe they’re all resigned, and Sam passes the hours, days, years -- separates time by the sharp wrenches of pain that plague him, that let him know that Dean’s alive and hurting somewhere; let him keep his humanity, a shred of it, close at hand.
Remind him of what he’s done, where the blame lies.
Michael’s staring, watching something invisible when Sam finds him next.
“What do you see?” Sam asks, suddenly bold -- he doesn’t feel less than them, anymore; no better and no worse.
“Everything,” Michael tells him, blinks, keeps watching; “always.”
“I see what you’re feeling,” he adds, and Sam winces, because he doesn’t know which he’d rather, doesn’t know what could ache more.
“Nor do I,” Michael answers the unasked question; “I’m not sure which is worse.”
ix.
“They’ll come for you,” Michael tells him one day, unbidden, and Sam stares, incredulous, unfazed. He doesn’t ask who.
“How do you know?”
Michael grins, the gesture small. “Because rising and falling aren’t so different, in the end,” and then be pauses, turns, and the motion has weight, calls upon things Sam’s fought beyond his means to hold on to, wrestled from the claws of angels and demons to preserve.
“And everything that rises must converge.”
And Sam, he chooses in that moment to laugh instead of sob, choses to remember and never forget.
The book, Flannery O’Connor; it was assigned reading, his sophomore year -- the summer the headaches started. His head was throbbing, vision blurring, but he had to finish, didn’t want to start off the school year behind. Not again.
So Dean had read it to him aloud, cover to cover, dusk to dawn, voice hoarse by the time he’d finished, so Sam’s eyes could rest and the ache could soothe.
Dean had read it to him, and Sam had fallen asleep just before the finish, missed a question on the quiz but still managed an A, and Dad never saw the paper, but Dean -- he’d been proud.
For the first time, Sam smiles in Hell.
And, well: he figures if he’s waited this long to know the end, he can hold out a little bit longer, wait a little bit more for what’s coming, what had never stopped.
His brother -- always -- will bring him home.
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Sam Winchester, Michael, Lucifer, Dean Winchester
Word Count: 8,008
Summary: The thing you have to understand, is that only three souls in all of Creation have ever seen the Cage, and it’s absolutely nothing like Sam Winchester would have guessed. Or: how soulmates survive as half of themselves. Spoilers through 6.11 - Appointment in Samarra.
Disclaimer: I own nothing but the plot. Everything That Rises Must Converge belongs to Flannery O’Connor.
Author’s Notes: Inspired by various commentaries on the stories of Judas Iscariot, the Fall of Lucifer, the general concept of ‘soulmates’, a few amorphous ideas, stream-of-consciousness, and Flannery O’Connor: this is an experiment in style that may or may not have succeeded, with a premise that’s, admittedly, a bit of a stretch. Mostly implicit, intentionally vague at times, and most certainly self-indulgent -- consider it a bit of... blasphemous creative exegesis in fic form; I love pondering and playing with traditional interpretations way too much to have simply let this go without at least trying.
Also, disregarding some pieces of 5.16 specifically that don’t quite add up with this pseudo-AU would probably be helpful.
Heathen Song
i.
The thing you have to understand, is that even demons can’t lie about what they’ve never seen. You have to understand that people can talk about what they haven’t known, but they can’t talk true; and seeing might not mean believing, in the end, but it’s sure as hell more reliable than the alternative.
The thing you have to understand, is that only three souls in all of Creation have ever seen the Cage.
For all they’d talked about it, feared it and wondered what it was, there hadn’t been a second, not a moment between weighted breaths where Sam’s heart hadn’t shivered, hadn’t throbbed with the terror, with the leaden promise of the pain that would await him. From the first thought, the first glimpse of an answer, a way to set everything right, to put it all to an end -- from the very first inkling, he’d envisioned it, watched it in his nightmares: darkness and soot and fire and death, all bones on the streets and blood in the water, soul-blackness lining the rungs of the bars that would hold him, sin and loss spun in his chains. He’d imagined agony, he’d imagined the worst and then he’d steeled for something even deeper, even more steeped in wrath, and he’d dared to hope for a mercy he didn’t deserve -- was smart enough, bleak enough to know he’d feel every crack, every cut and bruise, every vessel and vein crushed and every dying beat in him, every ounce of torment for eternity. He’d feel it all.
So he’d tried to steel himself for the inevitable, for the incomprehensible -- he’d try to picture the unintelligible in the center of his mind, but he could never have prepared for the reality; he could never have know what was waiting for him.
He could never have dreamed that the Cage was made of Light.
The first thing he knows is that there was no fall, no endless drop into nothingness, carved into chasms and space: he remembers his brother’s blood and the slow drift of his eyes sliding closed, and he remembers turning, tipping backward from the ankles, momentum as he grabbed the body that came at him, dragged it along and sealed fates as he curled, loose-limbed, and gave way -- succumbed.
He remembers bracing for the lurch, the pull in his gut as the bottom fell out, as his equilibrium shifted, started, shattered; he remembers the way his muscles clenched in anticipation as he watched the sky disappear, swallowed up in soil as he choked, went blind. He remembers motion, only because it didn’t last, he remembers pressure because as soon as he returned to himself -- as soon as reality shifted and righted, aligned to a new gravity, a new rotation and spin -- there was no grip on his arm, no nails dug red, bit bright against his skin.
There is nothing from above, down below.
And as it settles, the only fall that comes is when his eyes slip open to see his toes, bare skin on virgin white, solid nothingness and cool beneath the soles of his feet; the only fall comes when he gasps and loses his balance, when he slumps forward on his knees, dead weight against the ground. The only flinch comes when he takes in the brightness, when he yields against a glare that threatens, envelopes: embraces and condemns. The only lurch comes when he looks upward, sees tears that fall on the transient ceiling, transparent in places, patches of darkness left behind, abandoned as the light moves, dances in shifting patterns that cannot stay, don’t seem to want to -- the only lurch that comes wrenches hard at the heart of him, smatterings of feeling that he can’t connect to, can’t reach for, but that he knows, innately, are more his own than the prints of his fingers, than the blood in his veins.
The only sound comes from the rasp of his own breath, and he stares, blinks: every direction is painted in monochrome, the shades of his own form like scars on a canvas, too bold, too brash against the light. His lungs stretch, rush -- too fast, and it should burn; the air is thin, if it’s air at all -- scarce and cool and dry, and it should sear with every gasp, every pant as it all narrows, all comes in as spirals, folds and swims too fast.
He’s alone, except he isn’t; there’s no one, and yet he can feel the eyes on him, can feel the pull from above like something hard and heavy at the center of his chest, anchored in his ribs.
He is alone, and goddamnit, it should hurt like hell, but it doesn’t.
Not yet.
ii.
The soft pad of his feet, the suck-and-rush of simply breathing in and out and in: it all fades into the periphery, after a time, and there’s nothing to tap against the artificial silence that seeps into the gaps, a trick of the mind -- there’s nothing, for what Sam suspects might be a very long time, might be the space between heartbeats he can’t always feel, can’t always hear against the din of emptiness: waves reverberating ceaselessly, to the edge of forever and beyond.
And so it cuts sharp, harsh in the marrow when the sound comes, a snarl; he hears it, long before the lighting stutters and the shadows gather, cower before the Dawn and Sam sees it, the thing that makes the noise, holds the keys: it shifts between human and animal, demon and Grace, the man to the monster to the devil in the deep, the angel on high, one to the next between blinks of an eye, and Sam stops, watches as the creature, the venom, as Lucifer himself comes for him once again -- doesn’t bother with permission as he charges, teeth bared, unleashed.
There’s a flash, slow manipulation of photons and something higher, something otherworldly in this place, and there are wings -- tattered and visceral, magnificent: brighter and bigger than any Sam’s ever seen -- and when Satan lunges forth, Sam doesn’t dare to breathe, doesn’t need to; he feels the solidity of himself, his form collapse and give on impact, watches as Lucifer passes through him, aimless, untouched, and tumbles lightly to the ground, slack-jawed as he gapes up at Sam; beyond Sam.
Sam feels it before he notices, can verify it in any real way -- he feels presence at his shoulder and the displacement of matter and time bending around his consciousness as Michael strides forward: solemn, dangerous, expression shifting with faces that catch in facets, pieces of identities, shells stolen and spent.
It’s ironic, unthinkable: Sam had almost forgotten they were here, in this place; he’d almost forgotten all of the hows and the whys, until this very moment, until just now.
And the two of them, the brothers -- they stare, just stare: eyes of Light murderous as the Soldier stands his ground, mourns the loss, and it’s not enough, not nearly enough -- and Sam thinks that somewhere inside him, he knows that what he’s feeling, the heavy churn at his center like malice and decay; he knows that it’s nothing compared to real grief, honest suffering -- it’s a pale imitation of what he knows is stirring in his soul, beneath his awareness, outside his control.
He knows; and that’s almost sufficient, almost good enough.
There’s a long stretch of silence in which eons pass and lives are bought and drained; a war raged before the end, the victor sworn: Lucifer retreats like a frightened child -- and maybe, just maybe, that’s exactly what he is underneath all of the posturing and pretense. But there is no winner, here, only degrees of loss and strength and calloused wills against the fray -- blood and sweat and seedy, quiet throes, festering: and angels, they know how to hold a grudge, know how to stoke dying flames to fire again, let it spark and surge and fade.
“There’s nowhere to run, Samuel,” and it’s then that Sam realizes Michael’s attention has shifted to him; that Sam sees that Michael’s moved at all, and Sam wonders, idly, when he became a coward -- he doesn’t remember, it’s been too long.
“There’s no need for you to flee from me.” Maybe Michael comes close first, or maybe Sam heels like a trained beast -- it’s all the same, and Michael radiates heat in proximity, all the rage of a blaze. “Not anymore.”
Sam doesn’t think before he questions it, doesn’t even know if the doubt forms, if the suspicion takes hold: he doesn’t trust, except the clench in his gut -- and Michael understands it, reads it first.
“What could I do to you?” Michael asks, mournful -- quiet wrath. “What more could I take from you?” He looks Sam up and down, must see something in him, through him, on him as he shakes his head and curves his lips, grim: “I know an exercise in futility when I see one.”
Sam does bother to wonder if anything but futility exists here; exists anywhere.
“Do you know why I built this cage from Light alone?”
Sam doesn’t nod, doesn’t move; feels cold.
“Self-preservation,” Michael smiles around the words, like they’re fond, like they sear deep enough, slow enough to warm first, burn later. “Lucifer has far too high an opinion of himself, of his own importance. He’d destroy us all with a thought, if he could.” The smile turns melancholy, and Sam tastes bitter blood at the back of his throat -- betrayal as he knows it, can compare and connect to the deed. “Compassion and sentiment aside -- if we stood in his way, we wouldn’t stand long.”
Sam remembers sneaking out of motel rooms, straining plasma into bottles and sneaking hits after dark, across state lines -- Sam remembers deception and rage, sad eyes and a tightness in his chest, and maybe he is like Lucifer: more than is forgivable, more than can be redeemed.
“But himself,” Michael continues, less for Sam now; never for Sam to begin with; “that was the only thing he would never destroy.”
Michael lets himself absorb the brightness, lets his surroundings dim, allows himself ascend in every way he still can -- not enough. “Lightbringer,” he resonates, permeates, a confession to no one. “It kept him in,” and he runs hands that span continents against the confines, the prison walls; “but it kept him safe, as well.” Michael stills, loses something in the process as he whispers, stricken: “The one thing he wouldn’t destroy.”
For a moment, fleeting, Sam wishes he were made of Light.
“Keeping yourself safe, though,” Michael recovers after a beat, wry, detached -- enviable for it; “sometimes it comes back to bite you in the ass.”
Michael spins around in an instant -- Sam can’t follow the motion, not that it matters. “Because it’s not in the cards to be fulfilled, Sam,” he preaches, humorless mirth in his voice, not his eyes. “You can’t fight City Hall and expect to withdraw unscathed.”
And Sam doesn’t know what it means, but he thinks there’s something behind it, feels it shiver in his bones like a bad joke in the passenger seat when they’re running on fumes.
“You of all people should understand it,” Michael turns on him, turns away, leaving him exposed. “I loved my brother.” And it’s a crack in the pavement: breakable, paralyzing, step after step as it deepens, grips and pulls.
“Beyond everything he did, and everything he’ll do,” Michael says, and Sam’s heard the words without so many words; knows already how they’ll end; “beyond all things unforgivable, I love him.”
No one deserves that much; no one has ever earned a gift like that.
And Sam had never seen it, never known it; has seen and known and never cared, not enough.
Sam looks to the sky, to the ground, to the Light: looks everywhere, long, and gives himself an excuse -- too late -- to be blind.
iii.
As time passes -- as much as it can in this place - there’s a shift in things that Sam hadn’t been paying any mind to; and he almost misses it entirely, for the fact that his mind is elsewhere, steeped in blankness and fog.
It turns out that Michael’s the more decent of them, if ‘decent’ is even a word that can be used to describe a murderous warrior of God. But as Sam comes down from the clouds, stops losing himself so quickly in the radiance, against the waves -- stops letting it seep into him instead of enveloping him from the outside, starts owning it and calling it home -- there’s a precarious sort of common ground between the two of them, like ice on concrete, or walking on water. Michael appears at intervals, too often, too fleeting, and he’ll speak sometimes, brood others -- relive tales of the heavens and the earth, war and peace, pain and joy. They mean nothing, and Sam only half-listens, lets it mostly serve as white noise to fill the gaps and ease the longing; he tries not to grasp onto the sentiments, the songs of family and feeling that seek to grab out, latch onto him and pull him down fast, hard.
Sam’s come this far, fallen this low: he doesn’t want to find what lies beneath.
“I’m not trying to manipulate you, you know,” Michael tells him once in passing, never looks in his direction. “I’m not sowing seeds in your mind for my amusement.”
Sam closes his eyes and pictures a stone skipping across the water; wonders if he threw it, or if he is, in essence, the stone.
“You don’t have to question my motives,” Michael presses on, and Sam wonders if the angel glances toward him only when he isn’t watching, when Sam can’t see. “Because there are no motives to be had.”
“Angels are communal beings, you understand.” And for a moment, Sam wonders about Heaven, the greater, overarching reality of it, versus the smaller ones, the personal slices of paradisiacal bondage -- wonders what it means to be holy. “Here, I am bereft, cut off from the Host,” and it sounds almost sordid, and Sam almost remembers of himself: curled up on a stained dorm-room mattress, no sheets or pillows, just a cell phone in his hand with a familiar number lit up, never dialed; “I speak to you for my own benefit.”
Sam tries to remember when talking every solved anything; when its absence saved him any pain.
“You don’t have to fear me, here,” Michael says casually, a little degrading, mocking in his own way - Sam doesn’t make eye contact with him when he can avoid it, either, but it’s not because he’s afraid.
That doesn’t stop him from flinching, though, from holding a breath in, sharp -- shaved glass inside of lungs he doesn’t feel until they’re filled -- when Michael swipes a demonstrative arm toward, through Sam’s form, barred from contact, from striking true; proving his point with a smirk. “I couldn’t harm you if I tried.”
Sam lets the air out slow, and feels hollow - incomplete.
“When we find our way out, though,” Michael continues, glancing out into the ether, as if he can discern meaning in the endless, formless void; “you’d be wise to watch your back.”
He says when like he means it, intends it without irony; he makes his promise like he’ll keep it.
Sam notices his heart only in the beating; it thuds hard with the threat.
iv.
There are moments - fleeting instances, like a storm in the dark, lightning striking and revealing life against the black, a precious moment before it recedes; there are moments that are the exact opposite, where the light parts, the white separates, refracts into colors and shapes to reveal secrets, to show things that ache and claw and grab hold, that put weight to Sam’s form, that pull gravity against him and remind him which way is up: the way where he’s missing.
There are moments when Sam sneaks glimpses through the bars.
He sees a figure, this time -- silhouette cut dark, stiff, laid black from behind; watching through a window, just like Sam where he stands: a woman, a child, and Dean.
Dean.
The world sparks around him, the Cage rattles and Sam crumbles, folds down to his knees -- there’s the phantom impression of pain that almost breaks him worse than the real thing, muscle memory and sheer suffering impaling him, assaulting him from all sides and he trembles, fingernails grounding him and cutting into his palms. He can feel the skin break without the sting, and Sam is in flux, in transit, rendered and cast down, smote on the rocks -- he is everywhere and nowhere, and his gaze is fixed twice on the very same thing, and there’s no explanation, no understanding; there’s Dean, and there’s nothing, and there’s breeze along the block, and then the lamppost at his back as it flickers and blows, dies, and the darkness expands there as the light draws together here, there, here -- and Sam’s on his back and on his feet and all he sees is Dean, people and places and Dean in the afterimages, burned behind his eyes.
Like an omen, Lucifer is behind him, and the light swirls with him, a command as Sam feels the burn in his eyes start to lessen, give way to a sting; there’s a bitter taste in his mouth, behind his teeth, and he can see himself for the first time in Lucifer’s eyes, reflected -- his own gaze black, all diamonds and coal; there’s blood on his upper lip, like it maters if it flows, and there’s a chill, a shiver, like dew before dawn at the center of the sun -- and the walls aren’t walls, and the walls don’t end, but when Lucifer laughs, cackles; when Lucifer laughs, it echoes, vibrates, boils in his bones.
And the echo: it’s endless.
Sam squints his eyes closed, wills away the dark with more dark, and when the sound stops he looks again, sees Michael where Lucifer stands -- bright and looming, a menace drawn in grace, and Lucifer is diminished in the glow, somehow: dampened.
“Don’t forget, Samuel,” Michael sneers down at him, but there’s a gravity to it, a regret as he doesn’t look so much at Sam as he stares instead at his own brother, his own hardened heart. “This is Hell, as much as anywhere.”
Sam only knows that there are tears in any of it, for any of it, because of the light - the way it catches in currents and waves against the wetness on his lashes, reflects blindness and bitterness and loss back into him, sears it hard and settles deep.
v.
He makes a habit, then, of watching the shadows; tries to make them out again, tries to make sense of the shapes - it’s a game, almost, except there’s no pleasure in it, no way to win, no loss to suffer and bring about its end: futile, all of it, and Sam sighs, thinks of long, lazy afternoons caught between chaos, sprawled loose-limbed across the trunk, the roof, the hood of the Impala with sun-warmed metal, frost-chilled glass on the back of his neck, watching clouds and stars and the direction of the wind.
He never appreciated those moments enough, those reprieves. He almost wishes he had the chance to go back; almost would, if he could, except that he doesn’t know if he’s strong enough to survive it all twice.
He doesn’t startle at the presence at his shoulder; if he lets himself sink far enough inside his own mind, Sam can see the resemblance, at the surface; can comprehend why they were chosen, why they were destined -- he can imagine it’s his brother filling that space.
“You know what Hell is.”
Hell is hearing that voice, those words, and not Dean’s.
“Hell is severance,” Michael says as Sam breathes out, heavy; “mind, body, and soul. Hell is division, absence.”
“Hell is separation from what which you love with your deepest self,” Michael murmurs like a verdict, a sentence; “in the image of the Divine.”
And then he looks at Sam, locks gazes and pierces to the only part of him that really survives here, that matters at all; holds tight so it’ll listen, fast so it won’t fall.
“Hell is what steals away that which you love more than your own soul.”
And the grip is gone around him, the subversive sense of being bound, but Sam’s still gasping; the hard press of it all remains, closing in.
“I assume you’ve devised how this works?” Michael gestures around them, and Sam can’t string it all together, not just yet; he follows, but he can’t retrace the steps.
“No death, here. No decay,” Michael smile softly to himself, sad; “A taste of the home he forsook,” he recites, a long-practiced refrain, aloof as he tilts his chin skyward and lifts up his eyes.
“No violence, no physical harm.” And Michael moves to bring a hand across Sam’s face, wrap a fist around his throat, but he can’t, won’t -- stops short even if it doesn’t matter, lets a palm hover, cupped to the shape of Sam’s cheek, and Sam knows that Michael isn’t seeing him, is elsewhere on his own.
“The only pain known within these walls is here,” and Sam can almost feel the pressure of his touch, the way Michael’s hand trails down to his center of his chest, meaningful. “And that’s the curse inside the gift, really. The balance between the scales.”
Sam thinks maybe he does understand it; maybe it’s something in him as thick as blood, as deep as grace -- as woven into who and what he is as anything, as fierce as death and guilt and love. He thinks he understands.
Sam misses his brother like a limb; the heart between his lungs.
vi.
Focus, feeling -- it’s all peripheral here, it all loses meaning. Sam’s attention wanders, and whole lifetimes might happen that he doesn’t quite notice -- he can’t imagine time, or the way it used to pass: it all seems superfluous, and very far away.
He doesn’t notice anything until it changes -- and maybe it’s always been that way, maybe it’s never changed: maybe he’d put his heart into the wrong things and only noticed they were black once everything else had fallen away. Maybe it’s fate, or maybe he failed somewhere, fell of his own accord -- maybe it’s just the way all stories end, the place that all paths lead to.
Sam doesn’t notice anything until it’s far too late.
So when Lucifer appears before him -- emerges, takes shape out of the Light, his birthright, Sam’s rendered senseless, mindless; he’s beautiful, hideous: a holocaust in motion, and Sam sees it, will see it always, just behind his eyes -- flickering, real in ways he can’t comprehend, beyond his capacity to capture and to hold.
And like a serpent, a coil of temptation and regret, Lucifer circles him, studies him, watches him -- sees around and through, eyes narrowed if they’re even eyes: sightless and never-blinking, omniscient, a remnant of the holy at his core.
“I underestimated you,” and the voice isn’t one that Sam’s ever heard with his own ears, nothing he knows outside of his own mind -- it’s the same pitch and tone he’s heard in his nightmares, the same saccharine slip of syllables that sends him shivering, that has promised the universe and torn his world apart. It’s he whisper of the Devil clawing at his heart, and Sam follows him, turns as he turns; tries to steel himself, tries to hold himself steady if he can do nothing else, manage nothing more.
“When you gave in,” Lucifer says it, slow; a recollection from long ago, “when you said yes,” and he moves too fast, dizzying, impermanent: “at first, I expected a struggle.”
And something floods, something rushes forth and fills in all the empty places Sam had forgotten, the things that had seemed distant and faint in the ether -- something takes them in and seeps away, erodes them further, deeper, and leaves him that little bit more hollow in the losing, takes him that much closer to caving in as Lucifer smiles, surveys.
“I expected resistance,” Lucifer presses on, “but your soul was so broken, your heart was so black,” and he sounds giddy, and the lead sinks hard inside Sam at the sound: “you were like Christmas morning, Sammy.”
And fuck, but Sam can feel newsprint against his skin, letters rubbed off on sweat, classifieds and colors on his fingers as he unwraps barbie dolls and bullets, skin mags at the tender age of ten, and he tastes eggnog and too much alcohol like it’s real, like it’s right there, and he doesn’t know whether it’s worse to remember or forget in that moment, doesn’t know how to hide from everything about himself that was ever worth holding on to.
“Your hollow, rotting carcass, your rancid human husk, all just waiting for me,” Lucifer keeps on, keeps digging, tearing the layers back and skinning him, wasting him, but Sam knows better: he’s not sure what’s left to ruin. “And you; you gave in like you were waiting for it, begging for it, and I believed it.” He sounds almost rueful. “I let down my guard.”
And Sam was begging, in his way -- he can admit that now; but there’s nothing to lose anymore, there’s nothing to take, and Sam’s sick of running, sick of waiting and bowing and giving in. He’d failed the first time around; he’ll write his own destiny below the surface of the earth, on a plane of existence only he will ever see.
It might not prove anything; it might just be enough. “Fuck off, you son of a bitch.”
“Feisty!” Lucifer laughs, all acid and soot. “But that’s not just you in there talking, is it Sam?”
And Lucifer’s eyes glow as he says it, dying stars, and Sam knows before he knows, feels the elusive tug of being and becoming, momentum running the length of him, undimmed.
“It used to be that you could separate it, that you could see it like a braid, the black and the white,” Lucifer crosses fingers, demonstrative, and there’s a twist in Sam, at the center of him: something spiraled, twined -- something separate, but no less known; “where your brother curled up into you.”
And Sam breathes hard, dry and heavy -- knows in that moment whose touch keeps him whole; always has.
“It’s all jumbled now, shadows and highlights, shades of grey.” And Lucifer reaches out, waves a hand around him, maybe runs straight through whatever passes for a body in this place, whatever masquerades as the frame: transcending dimensions and redefining truth, and Sam thinks maybe it’s ludicrous, maybe it’s the only tenable notion left between this world and the next -- he feels empty but solid, tethered and unchained -- torn in between.
“It’s part of why I hate your precious big brother so much,” Lucifer leads him on, goads him; drops crumbs that taste of ash. “Thought admittedly, part of it was just because he’s an arrogant bastard with a stubborn streak that, quite frankly, cramps my style,” and Sam lets the warmth of it settle, the way that it’s true and it’s beautiful, and Sam misses it with everything that’s left in him.
“But what really got me,” and Lucifer shakes his head like it wasn’t the world ending, wasn’t a life rending, wasn’t a heart breaking; “was that no matter how hard I tried, no matter how much of me erased every inch of you, your brother held on.
And Sam knows it’s true, still wonders why: “Your brother kept faith.”
“Your brother,” Lucifer spits, and Sam lets his vision blur, dim for a moment -- lets himself relish the thought of it, the ability to see Dean in his mind’s eye, the memory that’s there, and it’s better to have that than nothing, it’s better.
“Your brother, against all attempts to prove the contrary, was righteous, god damn him,” Lucifer curses, execrates flesh and blood as he roars, explosive; “and he wouldn’t let you go.”
When it happens, it wrenches like a revelation, an imperative -- buried deep, unquenchable: a spark that shoots across and leaves nothing sacred, the scent of Dean beneath motel soap and aftershave: in the way Sam moves because it’s a two-step, a give and a take, in the rhythm of his lungs and the way he’d wake before dawn and rest before midnight when they could; would fill the silence between someone else’s breaths: and from the day he was born, arms that belonged to another were as close as his own, steadying his steps without a touch, saving him from the fire from miles, from moments away.
Sam’s heart feels heavy in a chest he can’t place -- he’s never been alone in his entire life.
“Did you really think it was a plastic soldier and a glint in the eye that let you wrestle back control?” Lucifer asks, incredulous and mocking as he croons, sneers. “A single soul in two bodies, Sam. Two souls fused to one.”
The voice that comes to mind floats across a bar in the world, far beyond -- beer stench and dim lights: Winchesterland. Special cases. Like soulmates.
Jesus Christ.
“Don’t tell me you didn’t know, Sammy,” Lucifer watches, doesn’t smile, but it’s all condescension, sadistic satisfaction condensed, made to burn. “You’re not all here.” And Sam knows it now, like everything he’d ever believed was only half right, everything he’d ever thought only half-formed, and he hurts for all the missing pieces, the parts he thoughtlessly, carelessly cast aside.
“But the best part,” and it’s the end of an equation, a balance and a need -- Sam can’t accept it, but there is nothing else: all the lies in the world can’t untangle them, and Sam’s afraid of what real loneliness means, now that he understands he’s never felt it full.
“The real kicker, is that dearest Dean’s not all...” Lucifer points a finger, innocent, terrible, toward a sky that means too much: “there.”
And it hits Sam, harder than a gunshot, quicker than a shock: Dean’s tears on the steering wheel, blind roads; Dean’s wrists shaking his grip on a hammer; Dean’s knees on dead soil, staring blank, like he can’t remember who died here, can’t recall what was lost; Dean’s eyes like Styx, not soulless but deadened, bereft -- a hand on the back of Sam’s body, a cheek next to a familiar face, an embrace that Sam knows is false, too true, and it’s too weak, lacking heart, the way his weathered, broken brother clutches to Sam’s body: and that’s what breaks him, that’s what makes it all cave in.
“That’s what half-a-soul looks like, Sam,” and he can see it, can imagine it just so, “walking around in the flesh.”
Sam’s never seen something so wrong.
“I suppose it’s preferable to the alternative, though,” Lucifer baits him, reads his thoughts. “I’m afraid your meat-suit’s been getting up to all sorts of mayhem upstairs, while you’ve been killing time here in the basement.”
The images in Lucifer’s eyes shift to reds and blacks and greys: gunmetal and blood, wholesale slaughter, and Sam’s glad for a moment, before it all starts to slot into place, that he’s already in hell, that he can’t be punished for it twice -- he’s glad until he catches glimpses, the shell of himself next to the the mockery of his brother that goes through the motions and keeps breathing ‘cause he can; until he realizes that he’s connected to something strong, unbreakable, strung close to his brother’s will and maybe that’s what keeps him just this side of sane -- but Dean’s been driven into the ground, run ragged: Dean’s burning from the inside, and there’s no way to stop it, no way to explain, and Sam; Sam can’t even say he’s sorry, can’t try to make amends.
“That’s what you said yes to, Sam,” Lucifer confirms, condemns. “That’s what you did.”
Maybe it’s different, maybe it’s the same -- maybe it’s as wrong and wretched as everything he did on the surface, in life: but it all comes back at once, all bowls into him and sucks him dry, takes what he should have been giving all along until it’s all gone, and it still isn’t enough.
“That’s what damnation looks like,” Lucifer murmurs, blinks until Dean is like a real figment, a solid vision there with them, and it hurts because it’s true; but not only. “Like hate twisted into need, into,” and Dean is gone before the word comes, ill-fitted, a blasphemy; “love, so it cuts all the more.”
“A fate worse than death, I promise you.” Sam thinks maybe Lucifer should have told him this story before, when he’d been trying so hard to gain Sam’s sympathy, earn his trust; because Sam feels it, agony: bonds as they stretch and break.
“Hate can ravage you, ruin you,” Lucifer snarls, but it doesn’t draw blood, falls flat: he’s empty underneath, and maybe that’s what ties them, makes them both the same. “But I went mad inside this place.”
And they’re not talking about here and now and him, anymore -- they’re not talking at all, and Sam sees Dean, sees Jess and his parents and his family and his failings in every flicker, every syllable, every blink and confession.
“I lost everything to the Cage, because my brother loved me,” and there’s so much said, so much surrendered, and Sam just wishes Lucifer could rip him, limb from limb, and let him bleed, let it end. More than anything, he wishes that.
“And that’s on you this time, Sammy,” Lucifer barely murmurs, barely says. “That’s on you.”
And there’s despair in him, a wash of it, debilitating, and for the first time since he fell, came here; for the first time, the light ebbs, and everything, for a blissful space, goes black.
vii.
He can’t let it go, afterward. All the connections, all the what-ifs and maybes, too many loose ends that could mean so much more now, that could be read deeper and brighter and stronger with the word on his tongue, in its light.
Soulmates.
In the stark sheen of revelation, everything regains its sharpness, reclaims its solidity -- heavier in the knowing, the feeling -- and Sam sees things clearer, grasps a little bit more of Heaven and Hell, of his heart and his mind, his soul, his brother’s. He thinks he’s ready when Michael comes to him again -- except he isn’t.
“You understand now, don’t you,” Michael asks, commands, and San almost does, but doesn’t; not yet.
And it’s instantaneous, inescapable; it’s truth written in the eyes, flashes and shades: he’s 11 years old and it’s his first Thanksgiving, except this time he’s nauseous at the dinner table, and he doesn’t bother to make the lie convincing when he runs: his dad’d be ashamed, but his stomach’s roiling and he barely makes it half-way down the street before he feels faint, hurls in hedges trimmed too short, too nice as he stumbles down sidewalks and roadsides, quick as he can, off-balance, lucky no one swerves wrong and turns him into roadkill. It takes a good fifteen minutes to pick the lock once he gets to their room -- Dean’s gone, and Sam doesn’t even bother to worry about the shit-storm that’ll hit once he gets back; just crouches there on the scum-encrusted bathroom floor, dead-halves of insects lodged in the tile-creases, his throat on fire, no telling sweat from tears on his cheeks. He doesn’t know how long it takes before the door swings open on its hinges and Dean’s there, all lanky half-grown limbs and pimples, crumpled learner’s papers sticking out of his back pocket; his eyes wild, frantic, angry until they settle on Sam, clutching porcelain for dear life.
“Christ, Sammy,” Dean hisses, and Sam catches in the background the things Dean doesn’t say, knows Sam’s already sorry for -- leaving without an explanation, disappearing without a trace, making Dean worry, wasting the family-size bucket from KFC that Dean wouldn’t have touched, because he’d been running around looking for his brother.
He cleans Sam up without a word, rough cloths and lukewarm water on his face, and Sam shivers for something bigger than the cold as Dean leads him to the bed they share; probably shouldn’t, small as it is, but that’s never mattered, and Sam doesn’t want it to start just now.
“Sleep it off, Sammy,” and Dean doesn’t have to say any more, ask any less; his voice is deep where Sam’s forehead settles, falls into the hollow of his chest, and the last thing he remembers of the entire ordeal is the smell of fried chicken, familiar in the stale motel air as fingers brush the bangs from his skin and feel slow for a fever, cool in the night.
Sam blinks, and Michael’s staring, watching, affirmation where Sam knows he looks lost at sea; he thinks of Heaven, of bullets in his chest and waking in the dark, the feel of being off-balance on his own, sharing eternity with someone who was missing, until he was found again, until they came back together and Sam reclaimed his center and the world and everything after felt right.
“He was spared,” Michael whispers, uncharacteristically gentle; “Dean’s soul was saved, Sam, and it would have kept yours close. But even so, you were promised elsewhere.”
And Sam shudders, afraid of the only place that this can go.
“You were always destined for Hell.”
And he’s older, taller, and he’s watching Flagstaff wake outside the grimy windows of the room he’s squatting in, tossing empty wrappers on the floor -- and it’s freedom, sure, but freedom’s hard and it lodges in his throat all tight; and freedom’s lonely, and Bones the dog is old, frail, and he died just before Dean came, and Sam cried when it happened, probably still had the tear-streaks on his dirty cheeks when Dean burst through the door and dragged him home, wrathful, and the pizza’d tasted like cardboard, the Funyuns were stale, the Mr. Pibb flat, and Sam couldn’t sleep without the sound of another body, another life -- one in particular, buzzing and humming and being, right at his side.
“My Father works miracles, sometimes,” Michael explains, still soft; “he can grant mercy in the most unlikely of places. You were in Heaven, sworn to its opposite; and you know what Hell is,” he prompts, and yeah: Sam knows.
Hell is separation from what you cherish at your core, in your deepest self; Hell is what steals away that which you love more than your own soul.
The night Sam leaves for Stanford is the night that everything changes, the night when something breaks inside of him that never remembers how to stitch back together. He misses orientation, and his first week of classes; doesn’t know how to keep time or balance on his own, not at first. It’s everything he thought he wanted, that he’d fooled himself into thinking it would fix something, would right every wrong, except all he’s left with is a dorm that reeks of beer and piss beneath cleaning solution and cheap detergent, a duffle filled with only the things that were replaceable, the things he didn’t need, and a worn Flannery O’Connor paperback that means the world to him, came from a bookstore in New Orleans out of his brother’s poker winnings at a bar he was too young to drink in, cloodstained on the edges of the pages halfway through from a paper-cut, a sacrifice, a piece of what he can’t let go of, can’t let himself forget.
“You were spared the pain of your Hell,” Michael tells him, but it’s too far to hear it beneath the thrumming, the hiss in Sam’s ears; “you saw your damnation as a lie, sweeter, less harrowing -- the stories retold to seem tender, treasured, your greatest hits.” Michael smiles, reminiscent, but it cuts Sam to the bone.
“Your Heaven was hidden from you, where your brother walked,” and Sam knows in that moment that angels can feel, can be cruel and be kind all at once: “and your perdition was eased in the trade.”
The city smells of smog, but not in here -- the Botanical Gardens are warm, fragrant, all rose-water and moss, and Dean had forged the permission forms, had masked his voice as best he could when he called himself in sick so he could come with, keep an eye on Sam for the trip, and Sam had been grateful -- too young to question how much he wanted Dean with him, to think twice about the comfort of Dean’s eyes on his back, Dean being there at any moment to rescue him, to keep him out of trouble, safe from harm.
It doesn’t take long before Sam gets lost in all the green, stops in an outcropping of hibiscus blooms to catch his breath, stare off and find no one familiar, nothing he knows, and he’s small enough, dwarfed enough by the world to cry for it, to make himself tiny in the corner and despair until there’s a hand on his neck and an arm around his shoulders, and Dean’s chest is there, right there, and he buries his face at the center and shakes away his fear with the knowledge that always, always, his brother’s going to find him, bring him home.
And it all comes together, revealed in good time -- it’s not hard to see the ties that bind, the threads weaving through the tapestry of Sam’s damnation as it was lived, as it was known: they’re all missing one thing, in the very same place, and they all only end when it returns.
When he returns.
Sam fights for balance as it all comes to the fore, as he remembers Dean’s words, so broken as they followed The Road in the Sky: Your Heaven is somebody else’s Thanksgiving.
Sam wants to laugh until he sobs, wants to sob until he runs dry; wants to tell Dean it’s not true, not real, not ever; not quite.
“Sometimes,” Michael says, close at hand, near to him -- almost warm, almost a comfort; “what we want is easier to face than what we need.”
Sam’s tears dry in the heat, stick longer, salt and grieving on his skin, on Dean’s, one and the same, struck in his soul.
Their soul.
viii.
Sam doesn’t see anything more, after that. Doesn’t see his brother, doesn’t lose himself in regret -- doesn’t have to, because regret is everywhere, and Sam floats on a whim of redemption, wonders how long he has to rot before absolution comes.
He doesn’t see Lucifer, not anymore.
Michael comes and goes; it feels as if maybe they’re all tired, maybe they’re all resigned, and Sam passes the hours, days, years -- separates time by the sharp wrenches of pain that plague him, that let him know that Dean’s alive and hurting somewhere; let him keep his humanity, a shred of it, close at hand.
Remind him of what he’s done, where the blame lies.
Michael’s staring, watching something invisible when Sam finds him next.
“What do you see?” Sam asks, suddenly bold -- he doesn’t feel less than them, anymore; no better and no worse.
“Everything,” Michael tells him, blinks, keeps watching; “always.”
“I see what you’re feeling,” he adds, and Sam winces, because he doesn’t know which he’d rather, doesn’t know what could ache more.
“Nor do I,” Michael answers the unasked question; “I’m not sure which is worse.”
ix.
“They’ll come for you,” Michael tells him one day, unbidden, and Sam stares, incredulous, unfazed. He doesn’t ask who.
“How do you know?”
Michael grins, the gesture small. “Because rising and falling aren’t so different, in the end,” and then be pauses, turns, and the motion has weight, calls upon things Sam’s fought beyond his means to hold on to, wrestled from the claws of angels and demons to preserve.
“And everything that rises must converge.”
And Sam, he chooses in that moment to laugh instead of sob, choses to remember and never forget.
The book, Flannery O’Connor; it was assigned reading, his sophomore year -- the summer the headaches started. His head was throbbing, vision blurring, but he had to finish, didn’t want to start off the school year behind. Not again.
So Dean had read it to him aloud, cover to cover, dusk to dawn, voice hoarse by the time he’d finished, so Sam’s eyes could rest and the ache could soothe.
Dean had read it to him, and Sam had fallen asleep just before the finish, missed a question on the quiz but still managed an A, and Dad never saw the paper, but Dean -- he’d been proud.
For the first time, Sam smiles in Hell.
And, well: he figures if he’s waited this long to know the end, he can hold out a little bit longer, wait a little bit more for what’s coming, what had never stopped.
His brother -- always -- will bring him home.