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Sam Winchester doesn’t want to die, but he would like to have the option to stay dead. Lucifer has other ideas. Sam sits on the bed of what he supposes counts as his chosen hemisphere and thinks. He doesn’t want to say yes, to put it mildly. Just like he didn’t want the demon blood the hunters tried to force-feed him. He’s proud he didn’t drink it. So why did he brush his teeth five times already? Why does he still taste the phantom taste of power, even now? Lindsey said that nothing is so bad that it can’t be forgiven, but she doesn’t know the cosmic scale of this, can’t really understand the gravity of what happens if (when) Sam slips up.
Hell, even seeing Jess couldn’t lift his spirits, and the fact that she turned out to be Lucifer just really, really tracks with Sam’s luck lately.
Of course, punishment might be a more apt term. And anyway, what does it matter? No Dean, no Jess, no truly good fibre in this body of his, lovingly built for evil. All Sam can really hope for is a way to keep the evil out.
The first time is a test, because the literal devil seems like the kind of person who might lie. A little drive to a secluded place, a well-placed gun to the head, a note in his pocket in case this works and alarmingly few doubts later he knows it’s true, thinks he can remember feeling his brain draw itself together again, soggy cereal clumping together, but it’s all blurry, bright and cold.
He takes notes, brainstorms what he thinks might work. He wishes he had taken more weapons, but he had been out of the game, naive and unbearable as it is to think about now.
He’s not keen to try explosives or fire, as that could put the people around him in danger. He doesn’t rule them out completely, though, but rather makes a note to find a safe place to use if necessary.
Still, he’s not without more immediate options. Wood chipper tends to trump a lot. He locates one rusting away at an abandoned farmhouse not too far from where he’s staying and to his, well, not exactly relief, but something way too close, it’s in working order. He places the note next to the machine, no use if it gets shredded. It’s loud and messy and the mental block is bigger with this, but he feeds himself into its angry, raging mouth. For a moment, he feels everything in precise agony. His skin is shredded and flayed, his muscles and fat chewed up. His bones crunch and grind. Blood sloshes around without finesse, organs squelch. His nerves are stretched and twisted, trying desperately to send messages of pain to a brain that is disconnecting more and more by the second, though still managing to deliver absolute horror.
Then he only knows cold and a vague recollection of muscle, bone, skin and everything else that makes up Sam weaving together again.
He’s splayed out on the grass and slightly out of breath. He pushes himself up to a sitting and then a standing position, huffing out a dry laugh when he realises he is, indeed, now on the other side of the machine, like a tree that went through but won. He brushes some specks of an unidentifiable organ off his note - apparently Lucifer gets sloppy when the cleanup is too much of a hassle - and puts it in his pocket again.
On the plus side, the farmhouse’s yard also holds a large fire pit and a quick scramble through the shed reveals a blowtorch. He stands in the pit, feeling foolish, and turns it on himself. It won’t ignite right away and Sam feels the insane urge to laugh at the mental image of himself looking to all the world like an oversized shrimp in an oversized bowl waiting to be prepared, but the world isn’t watching. He’s alone.
When he finally gets the thing to work he thinks of Dean in hell, for him, and he doesn’t pity himself for even a second of the pain he feels before Lucifer brings him back unscorched.
He manages to swipe an angel blade from some hunters who are passing through on a case and he doesn’t really expect it to do much, but tries his heart as the most likely spot. It is intimate and his heart won’t stop beating beneath the tip of the blade, jumping like a rabbit running from a wolf. And somehow I’m both. Sam is really starting to wonder whether he’s losing his mind or fighting a noble battle. He ends up jamming the blade into the floorboards and falling onto it awkwardly. He can’t remember any pain this time.
Death is not something Sam has equated with comfort much in his life, but now he realises how wrong he was not to. There is no escape from anything now. His quest begun as a way to thwart the devil, but has morphed into something bigger, or perhaps much smaller: saving himself.
Side effects from curses appear to linger after he has been brought back, which is unhelpful, not to mention embarrassing when Sam has to go back to the witch he has tricked into killing him to ask her for a cure for the eternal hiccups he is left with. She is so spooked to see him again that she complies immediately and Sam doesn’t have the heart to kill her.
No crossroads demons will make any deals with him regarding this, unwilling to touch a topic as hot as Lucifer’s vessel, no matter which side they are on. They probably wouldn’t be powerful enough, anyway, but a man can try, you know? It feels like dodging responsibility to Sam, but that’s demons for you. He scrubs the dirt from under his fingernails and wonders if what he’s doing counts as taking responsibility or running from it in the eyes of the world.
Bobby gets suspicious after one too many lore questions about resisting angelic healing so Sam stops calling him after a while. It was a long shot anyway. Sam’s own research mainly led to sources on how to obtain angelic healing and resurrection. Dying tends to be the problem, not surviving.
When Dean decides they can ride together again, the first thing he does is hand Sam one of the things he’s been aching to test: the demon knife. It’s silly, he knows it shouldn’t work, but it feels so appropriate.
He feels guilty as hell about it this time, because he can’t deny what he is doing to his brother if it works, not now that he’s right there again. His note feels inadequate and childish, but it is in his pocket either way as the knife pierces his stomach while Dean is running an errand. He feels sick and hot and then nothing but cold as he hurries to clean blood and guts from his unscathed body before Dean gets back.
They’ve been doing better. It would be good to let his little project go, but for the lingering doubt. He wouldn’t say yes, he had meant it when he said he would rather die. But he can’t die. It’s affecting him. It leaves a hole in him that can’t be filled by his brother, that shouldn’t be filled at all, that should be ripped open until there is no more Sam, but that’s not possible. Maybe this is how it works, this painless, merciful torture, this stripping of the self as the rise of the vessel and it strikes Sam that he is also in a vessel, his body the vessel for his soul, the very body that is also Lucifer’s perfect vessel and that seems to obey the latter much more readily.
In a sense, he is possessing Lucifer’s vessel much more than Lucifer is trying to possess him, because Lucifer needs a yes but Sam is just here, in this body that does not belong to him. Like a demon, he has no permission. He just takes.
Sam tries an exorcism on himself after that revelation, using jogging as an excuse to get away, Dean mumbling something about health freaks that makes Sam’s (the vessel’s) heart ache with fondness. He finds a quiet corner in the park and cites the words he knows by heart, but nothing. He tries some variations, using his basic knowledge of Latin to switch around some words, but it’s useless. Maybe it would help to go back to demon blood, but he isn’t ready to face the consequences of a reawakened addiction if it doesn’t work. Not without trying absolutely everything else first. At least the run was nice.
The colt is difficult to sneak out of the impala without alerting Dean, but his brother’s tendency for heavy drinking works in his favour, as it makes him leave his baby at the motel more often, clearing the way for Sam to raid the trunk. He doesn’t expect much of anything, barely remembers to check for the note, before he pulls the trigger and sends one of the precious bullets into his brain.
It’s cold again, unpleasant and lingering and Sam’s head is killing him - ironic, because he can’t seem to stay dead, but he also doesn’t know where he is right now so maybe this is it, surely he is not one of the five things in the universe that can’t be killed by the colt so hopefully he also can’t be brought back.
“If you were so desperate for some alone time with me, you could have just said yes, Sammy. All the time in the world for us to get to know each other then.”
The voice is cheery but laced with disdain and it is wholly unwelcome.
“I would rather-“
“Die, yes, so you said, but that doesn’t seem to be working out so well, does it?”
Sam can’t really argue with that, can’t really argue with much of anything because he’s not sure what’s going on. Deciding that opening his eyes might be a good place to start in order to find out, he forces his unwilling (nonexistent?) eyelids apart.
A terrible light nearly blinds him and he finds himself wishing it had blinded him. There are no words for what he is looking at, though his brain is hardly deterred by that and tries to find them anyway.
He is enveloped in a pure kind of rot, a healing poison with a face, full of faces, even, that see every last part of him, down to the molecule. The light penetrates him beyond the physical, beyond the mental even, and Sam realises that it is beautiful and that he hates it. The being, because that is what it is, is terrifying and awe-inspiring, peeling yet whole. A sum of parts that has more parts than sum. If Sam had use of his body (the vessel) he would bow and vomit at the same time.
“Really Sam, you need to buy me dinner before you get to see me naked.”
Sam starts at the reminder of who it is that he is with and shuts his eyes again, wondering ever so briefly how it is that he opened and closed them without having them.
“You did a real number on yourself this time, Sammy. It is taking me longer to put you back together. Does that make this a cry for help?”
Sam figures it honestly might, but he’s not about to tell the horrifying archangel that surrounds him that. He probably doesn’t need to anyway, what with Lucifer rooting around in what passes for his brain at the moment, weaving and sewing together broken pieces.
“We’re going to have to talk about this at some point, Sammy. This has been fun and all, but I’m ready to take this relationship beyond flirting, just as soon as you’re done playing hard to get. Maybe we should DTR - define the relationship? A simple yes will suffice, but we could make a ceremony out of it, of course. Make it official?”
Sam wishes he could plug his ears against the voice, a screeching and crooning that is so shrill yet soft, addictive yet repulsive, but he knows it wouldn’t work even if he could manage it physically. The voice is everywhere, it is inside him.
“Come on Sammy, don’t do this. Talk to
me man! Come on dude, come back to me Sammy, don’t leave me, not like this…”
A bone-deep shiver wracks Sam’s frame as he shudders back to consciousness. He gasps and his throat makes a horrible sound. A face is looming over him, Dean’s face, not Lucifer, horror and anger and love and dread battling it out on his pale features.
“Sammy. Oh god. Sammy” he breathes.
“What happened? What did you do?!”
Concern and something that looks horribly like guilt are the emotions that Dean’s features settle on as he supports Sam into a sitting position, inspecting his head for the wound that should be there.
“What the…”
But the fog of waking up in this world is lifting and that takes him away from it, because the sharpening of his mind makes him remember what he saw. He can’t focus on Dean any longer, can’t stop thinking about the being of terrible light, Lucifer, how he would do anything to never see that again. How he wants nothing more than to see it again. To douse his eyes with bleach, only to revel in the decay, something like that, but words are coming from so far away now, a realm that has nothing to do with the magnificent nightmare that he has seen, can’t see, won’t stop seeing, and words do fail him this time, just one phrase remaining: assault of the ontological.
He is making some sort of keening noise, but he isn’t sure how or why and Dean is talking to him, slapping him, waving his stupid note in his face but Sam isn’t there anymore, he is in the light and the cold.
Sam wakes up in his bed, tucked in and so cozy and warm he could cry with relief and guilt, his big brother’s hand resting on his pulse as if to make sure. The colt is gone. His note is lying next to him, his own words reaffirming what he already knows, filling him with pride and shame that this was how he planned to leave his brother.
“I didn’t say yes.”