Like an Open Wound Upon Waking 1/1
Fandom: Supernatural
Pairing: Lucifer/Sam Winchester
Word Count: 984
Rating: T
Summary: Sam’s Hell was a cot and a warehouse and a smell and a voice in his ear when he woke up saying "Good morning, Vietnam."
Also posted on AO3 here.
“Good morning Vietnam.”
Lucifer said it for the first time on their first morning. Well, whenever it was that they first woke up in the Cage. The fall into the Pit had been near-endless, the hole in the earth somehow both unfathomable and claustrophobic, their tumbling bodies ripped apart by the sharpest pieces of the darkness. After some length of time, Sam’s mind simply gave up, and refused to register the fact that all his flesh was gone but he could still feel more of it peeling away. It was the only part of his time in Hell that he couldn’t remember.
When he next opened his eyes (somehow he had eyes again), he was lying on a hard surface. What he could see of the room from his position was blurred by heat and dim red light and his own exhaustion. The smell didn’t help his concentration - the sour metallic of a festering wound hitting him over and over again - but one thing at a time. He felt himself settle into what he liked to think of as “Dean-mode.” This isn’t happening to Sam, fuck-up ex-bookworm and Lucifer’s current bitch. No, he’s watching someone like Dean handle the situation, calm and strategic like a soldier. It takes some digging, but he conjures up what his brother had been to him before Stanford. That Dean was a superhero, and that Dean can get through this just fine. He’ll just... be that Dean.
Though this part of the Cage was about as creepy as could be imagined, there didn’t seem to be any immediate threat. He could feel the damp insistence of the room’s heat all over his body, so hopefully no nerve damage from the fall. Sam allowed himself a small smile at that, as if their bodies down here were real. His actual body was probably crushed deep within the earth, already rotting between stones. Still, everything felt real. As he ran through the mental checklist Dad had taught him, cataloguing the heaviness of his boots around his intact feet, the stickiness of the floor pulling at his uncracked scalp, the hand circling his unbroken wrist - oh God.
Sam whipped his head to the left, the rest of his body still sensitive yet unresponsive from whatever manifesting into the Cage had done to him.
Lucifer, looking again like his other vessel (Nick?), had apparently woken up next to Sam, and was staring at him with what in anyone else would have been concern. The Devil had his fingers curled across Sam's pulse. As soon as their eyes met, Lucifer nodded slightly - apparently satisfied that his ex-vessel was intact - and turned his face again towards the ceiling.
Sam opened his mouth to speak, ask a question, pull away, anything - and Lucifer lightly squeezed his wrist. His hand was warmer than the concrete floor, and Sam stilled at the touch for reasons he files away with the memory of the Cage's smell. Then Lucifer muttered that little phrase, resigned and irritated and maybe just a little fearful of eternity, and Sam smiled before he could help himself.
“Good morning, Vietnam.”
What? It was kind of funny, considering.
*
“Good morning, Vietnam.”
Sam still remembers how it echoed across the warehouse walls.
The Cage was so terrifyingly simple, so familiar and earth-bound and just a little bit wrong. It looked like any one of the countless warehouses that Sam and his brother had explored with cocked guns and sweeping flashlights, looking for whatever creature had made its bloody nest in the corners. It was like Dean was just over in the next room and any second now he’d yell for “Sammy” with irritated fondness.
Sorry, Dean, didn’t mean to wander off, just thought I’d kill some time with the Devil.
Later, Sam would learn about Crowley’s mundane new decorating scheme for all of Hell, and part of him would decide that the Cage had naturally followed suit. Maybe before Lucifer’s second fall, maybe then it had been whirlwinds of fire and pitchforks carved from the bones of infants, but Sam’s Hell was a cot and a warehouse and a smell and a voice in his ear when he woke up. It had been almost poetic. Maybe Crowley was a fan of Sartre.
Dep down, though, Sam knew the design of the Cage wasn’t Crowley’s at all. It was obvious, at least to Sam, that the Cage was Lucifer’s kingdom, and that the insult inherent in that meaningless autonomy was God’s real punishment. Inside his sad little box, the Father had said, let him do what he wants. It won’t matter to humanity.
Well, it mattered to Sam.
Lucifer designed the Cage to be familiar, just messy and ominous enough to put Sam at a strange kind of mid-hunt ease. It didn’t help that the Devil was shorter than Sam and wore dark green shirts and ruffled Sam’s hair (when he wasn’t cutting him open) and made pop-culture references and smirked like a cocky teenager who knew someone would love him anyway. He was offering a perverted kind of Dean with each “Good morning Vietnam” and it was half-gift and half-torture every time.
*
“Good morning, Vietnam.”
As the years in the Cage twisted tighter and tighter around Sam, it became a shared joke, then a cruel taunt, then his ritual initiation into each day of endlessly intimate pain. Still - through every day that Lucifer ripped him apart with bare hands, or let him hallucinate a rescue, or curled behind him warm and sweet while whispering “I think you like it here,” Sam never forgot that first awakening. He never forgot the moment that a hand tightened around his wrist and made sure he wasn’t alone.
“Good morning, Vietnam.”
As he curls his fingers into the cheap motel bedspread and tries not to wake Dean by screaming, Sam knows he let the Devil in a long, long time ago.