Fic: We Won't Pass This Way Again (so kiss me with your mouth open)
I know, I know: apocabigbang. Blame my sister, she made me write this. I'm not even kidding.
Title: We Won't Pass This Way Again (so kiss me with your mouth open)
Rating: R
Pairing/Characters: Sam/Lucifer, mentions of Sam/Ruby; Dean, Lucifer, Sam, mentions of others.
Warnings: Adult language, sexuality, slight bloodplay, Lucifer being a fucking creep.
Words: 5,889
Summary: You know how they say you can kill someone with kindness? Well, Sam's finding out the hard way that patience and understanding can be just as lethal.
A/N: Written for my ~demanding sister with the prompts "candles" and "herbs" (well, hey, it's not herbs but it's got a plant, okay?). This is also somehow my first official Sam/Lucifer fic. Huh.
Endless thanks and ~cottage-grown flowers go to devilyouwere for hand-holding, beta-ing, and being an awesomely supportive insomniac with me. ♥
If we live to see the other side of this,
I will remember your kiss
So do it with your mouth open
And take your foot off of the brake
For christ's sake
- "Dilaudid," The Mountain Goats
~ ~ ~
Each time he finds him on the outlands of sleep, when Sam has just melted over the line of awareness and slipped into the haze where he waits, folded into a human body, patient and undemanding. He smiles when Sam turns to him, lifts a hand and lays it on Sam's face, twisted with fury and deliberation, with I shouldn't, this is wrong - a soft hand, an accepting hand. One that says I know you, I know your flaws and accept them willingly.
Sam allows those doubts and imperfections, all that anger that buzzes constantly within his ribs, to pour down Lucifer's throat when he fuses his mouth to Sam's and kisses away the world.
He is far gentler than the devil has any right to be. Not like Ruby, not sparking with mischief and lust. Lucifer is quiet and careful, content to explore Sam's body as if he has never laid eyes on human flesh before, as if he has never touched anything quite so magnificent, as if he is constantly hungry for more.
As if he covets.
Lucifer wrings a gamut of sounds from Sam's throat, breathless pants and keens, simple words of want and contrition, some of defiance, others of pleading. There is only one syllable that never falls from his mouth, no matter how it claws at his throat or how completely Lucifer unravels him.
~ ~ ~
Dean gives him a sidelong look as they slide into the Impala for another day of rambling through back country. The day is bright and sharp in Sam's eyes, the sunlight scalding as it glances off the hood. He roots past crumpled paper cups and old cell phones, a Desert Eagle, a pack of unsmoked cigarettes, bags of salt and ketchup packets until he finds a scratched pair of cheap sunglasses. They hook around his ears crooked and they're smeared with greasy fingerprints and scored with deep scratches, but they serve to smother the light if only a little.
Sam sighs and hunches deep into the leather that moulds itself flawlessly to his body after so many years.
"You catch a bug or something?" Dean asks. Sam doesn't have to look at him to see the crease burying itself between his eyebrows, how his eyes get a little clearer, a little greener, when he worries and tries not to show it.
Sam shakes his head and snaps his seatbelt over his chest. "Just tired," he answers. Dean seems unsatisfied but there are no more words to say, nothing that could explain his retreat into petrified silence.
The Brian Jonestown Massacre drags him into a doze while they zip down the I-30 towards the yawning copper mines of West Texas. Lucifer is already waiting for him when he blurs over the horizon of sleep.
It is a nondescript room, one akin to every moldy, dank motel he has spent most of his life in. He can no longer tell them apart; every room, every state, every bed that's more like a back brace than a mattress becomes the same after a while. After twenty-six years Sam wouldn't say he's so much used to it as he is resigned to apathy. It's a place to sleep, and more than that he's still miraculously alive to be able to sleep at all, so he thinks it would be pretty ungrateful to start complaining now.
"You're here," he says, the sound weak and soft as it falls into the space between them. Lucifer sits in a chair near the door, ankle slung casually onto a knee, hands folded together across the subtle round of his stomach.
"I am here."
He smiles, seemingly pleased that Sam is here. Energy, awareness crackles in the air between them. They both know where this will end; it's only a question of how to begin.
Lucifer never pushes, he never coaxes Sam into doing anything he doesn't want to. He simply waits, and accepts, and moves fluently when Sam inevitably makes the first move.
This time, Sam resolves he won't.
He takes a seat on the far bed and clears the thickness from his throat. He finds himself wanting inexplicably to reach, to touch, but before it shifts from want to action he sandwiches his hands between his knees. It falls quiet, sunlight edging in around closed blinds and thin curtains, dust motes swirling in the air, Lucifer's thumbs twiddling in small movements against one another.
"You're tired," he says eventually.
Sam shrugs and watches a car go by in the parking lot; he doesn't know if the car is there because his subconscious thinks it should be, or if this is really some physical realm that Lucifer has created, maybe a memory. He studies the olive carpet and it's nothing he remembers - the beige chairs, the faded maroon bedspreads. This isn't a place he's been before.
"Where are we?"
Lucifer pulls up one shoulder and blinks slowly, slow enough that Sam sees the sunlight sliding along the blond curves of his eyelashes. "Nowhere. Anywhere."
It doesn't make sense and Sam wants, he needs -
"Why are you tired?" Lucifer asks. Sam thinks he probably already knows, he must, but there is a genuine edge of concern in his voice, a soft sincerity that Sam hasn't felt since California and a life with a beautiful girl, a life built on a lie.
Sam shrugs and stares at the carpet and pushes his thumb hard into the hollow of his palm. "Tired of running, I guess."
"Then stop."
He snorts weakly. "You would say that."
Lucifer's head tilts as his eyes slant into curious commas. "Why would I want that?"
"Why wouldn't you?"
"I want you to be healthy, Sam."
"Right, right. And by that, you mean you want me to get all rested up so I can be in tip-top condition when you jump into my body."
"No," Lucifer drawls patiently, tone slightly admonishing. "I want you to rest because you're grouchy when you don't sleep."
A long slow smile and Sam's hands leave his knees, reach out -
The door slams shut with a bang and Dean's fist taps the roof three times in succession. Sam jerks awake hard enough that his face nearly meets the dash.
"Look alive, Sammy, we got butts to kick."
Sam watches his brother's back bob and dip as he walks toward the motel office. Dean is so oblivious and scared and angry that sometimes Sam feels it in the deepest marrow of his bones. It's familiar enough that he sometimes feels like he's staring straight into a mirror instead of at Dean; familiar enough that sometimes he wonders how they can even tell themselves apart from each other anymore.
~ ~ ~
They split up on the hunt because Dean is learning to trust Sam again, he's learning to be confident in Sam's abilities to take care of things again. Dean canvases the town, sleek in his stolen rental suit and shining car, while Sam pokes around the warehouse where demons have been getting up to no good. A ten-foot sigil tattoos the concrete floor, streaked with blood from the half-rotten carcass of a pig that's been shoved into a far corner. It reeks like death enough that Sam has to cover his nose with the sleeve of his jacket so as not to retch.
He's fishing through the backlog of information in his head, trying to match the sigil with something he's studied before, when the demons show up.
The far wall vibrates with a huge clatter as the steel door falls. Sam spins and whips his knife through the air, but there's nothing for it since in the same instant the lights cave in and the warehouse goes solid black. Sam calls, "Who's there?" even though he knows what this is.
It's a trap. They laid a perfect plan and Sam swallowed the hook like an amateur. He should have recognized the signs - the carvings of Winchester into each victims' body, the epidemic spread of rumours that he and Dean were working on the side of the demons now. It should have sent up a red flag that this was pure and simple bait, but in his eagerness to prove that he could do this, that Dean could trust him, he'd slipped and stumbled right into their net.
An oily laugh seeps through the darkness at Sam's back, spinning him in another one-eighty. The candles dotting the perimeter of the sigil flicker to life all at once, orange-white flames springing up of their own accord to slowly digest brittle wicks and softened wax. The demon is a man, is wearing a man, a middle-aged one with Levi's and a pinstripe workshirt. Sam feels a momentary stab of ache for this man and his family. He won't be coming out of this alive; another fallen innocent, and this, this is what they're fighting to stop.
"Well that was easier than expected," the demon says with a country twang. Another one appears at his back, then another, and another, a whole pack of them sniffing and salivating, licking their chops, impatient for the kill. Sam can smell their hunger from here.
"I'll kill you if you take another step," he says with false bravado. The knife hilt is warm in his palm, solid and promising. He can get them if they come close, one or two at a time, but there's fourteen of them now and they just keep coming out of the woodwork. It's not looking good. "Every last one of you."
A woman with ginger hair and bottomless black eyes moves to the forefront, a purr lilting out of her painted lips. "Oooh, little Sammy Winchester. Always so ready to cut to the main event." She steps closer, hovering just out of arms' reach, and waggles her breasts obscenely at him. "Not even a little foreplay?"
Her laugh becomes a chorus of them. Sam shivers and resituates the knife in his grip. "What the hell do you want?"
"Well, you of course," the first demon says.
"And you took the cheese so beautifully, too," the ginger-haired woman says.
Sam forces a laugh. "It won't be that easy."
"Oh yeah," Ginger moans as she sidles closer, close enough to skim a French-tipped nail along Sam's collarbone. "Big strong man -"
She doesn't get to finish because Sam right hooks her in the jaw and plants the knife deep in the pit of her belly. Pulses of light eat her up from the inside as she wriggles and scratches at Sam's face, catching him just hard enough once to tear a line of red into his skin from cheekbone to the corner of his mouth.
The other demons charge and in the space it takes for Sam to jerk the knife out of Ginger's limp corpse and to think, I'm fucked, every body in front of him suddenly freezes and crumples and pours out a scream filled with more pain than Sam's ever heard, the kind of scream you only hear in Hell itself.
The demons' eyes burn out, their tongues catch on fire, their flesh melts and fuses to their bones and their bones fuse to the floor. It's a horrifying thing to watch. Sam stumbles and stops breathing and wheels clumsily around when the weight of a hand descends on his shoulder.
The blade buries to the hilt between Lucifer's eight and ninth ribs, but he only responds by glancing at it in little more than curiosity. His lips curve into a simple smile as he withdraws it slowly and hands it back to Sam, blunt side first.
Sam smells blood and metal and an old hunger wells within him. The shame of it is crushing but he can't help but wonder - wonder what it must be like, taste like.
Lucifer laughs unexpectedly, the sound of it hushed. "Oh no, I'm afraid not."
"Get out of my head," Sam snaps on instinct.
"It would burn you alive," Lucifer says, voice dropped low as he bends to touch his fingertips to one of the demons' corpses. Beneath his touch, it shrinks and falls into a tiny pile of ash in the vague shape of a human. "From the inside out," he continues as he disposes of the others. A quick cut of eyes in Sam's direction, then, "You're not ready yet. Give it time."
The last one he burns is the red-haired woman at Sam's feet, though he hesitates when he reaches her. He kneels and stares at her, worrying a corner of his lip between his teeth in a habit too common, too human for something as monstrous as he.
"She didn't have any children," Lucifer says quietly. Sam watches as he brushes a tendril of flame-red hair from the woman's forehead. "She had a sister, though. And a cat."
He touches two fingers to her cheek and she just goes away, transforming immediately into a shapeless pile of gray dust.
Lucifer looks up at him then, staring up from his knees, and Sam loses his breath.
"You're welcome," he says flatly.
Sam almost smiles, though he doesn't know why. "You saved me. Why? You could have let them take me - that sigil, that's basically mind control in a box. They were going to make me say it."
Lucifer shrugs but doesn't rise. "I wouldn't have let them do that to you."
"But it would get you my body, isn't that what you're gunning for?"
"Mind control isn't permission, Sam."
"But it's a... convenient loophole. You seem like the type who would take advantage of that." Sam bites down on his tongue. He doesn't know why he's standing here giving the devil suggestions on how to steal his body right out of his grasp. It's ridiculous and Dean would kill him if he knew, but Lucifer is still on his knees in front of Sam and he's just so easy to talk to, so very easy.
Lucifer looks briefly taken aback. "The type?"
Sam shrugs. "Well, you know. Satan."
This time it's a laugh, simple and carefree. "Ah, yes. The old names." He rises to his feet with a grace too fluid to be governed by human muscles. Sam suddenly feels both huge and clumsy and too small at once. "Morningstar. Iblis. Serpens niquissimus. Der Leibhaftige." He chuckles at the last one. "I do have a proper name. People seem to... forget."
Sam watches him move closer. There's nothing more terrible than this beast in front of him, yet even as he moves into Sam's space there is no hint of a threat rolling from Lucifer. Only a pervading electricity, a rattling hum like the gather of energy before a storm. A serenity. A... fascination.
Lucifer's eyes shift pointedly to the line of blood Sam can feel sneaking down his face. "Would you like me to take care of that for you?"
"No," Sam barks, then repeats himself more quietly. "No."
"Does it hurt?"
Sam angles away from the weight of Lucifer's gaze. It's unnerving, being the sole object of his attentions. He thinks of an ant under a magnifying glass, burning alive with the sun refracted through the lens. "I'll live."
Lucifer nods understandingly. He's quiet for a long moment before drawing a sudden breath. "Pain is such a curious thing. I should like to experience it myself."
Sam knows he should laugh. He knows he should snort and spit back some witty retort that promises copious pain and destruction in his future. He knows he should say that he'll see to it that Lucifer gets to experience more than his fair share of pain before the end. He knows he should say this because this is what Dean would say - Dean, all brawn and fire and denial. Dean who doesn't face up to reality when it's too hard for him to accept. Dean who believes, for some reason, that they're going to make it out of this alive, and so Sam believes it too.
But he doesn't say any of these things, and soon Lucifer is speaking again, raising a hand near his face and asking, "May I?"
Sam opens his mouth to speak, but no sound comes. His jaw works and closes again. He is held, pinned in place by the hooded stare Lucifer is piercing into him, curious and patient and, oh god, seeking permission that Sam wants desperately to give.
He doesn't say yes because he can never say yes to Lucifer, but Lucifer reaches out, all the same. He trails the calloused curve of his thumb along Sam's face, catching a sweep of blood from the hollow beneath his cheekbone. For a fleeting moment Sam thinks Lucifer is healing the wound, so he quickly says, "I don't want to owe you any favors."
Lucifer's hand pauses on his face. His gaze moves, smooth as liquid, to Sam's eyes before returning to his cheek. "No," he says distractedly. "I supposed you wouldn't."
The sting of the cut is still there when Lucifer's hand pulls back. Blood coils along his thumb in a thin ribbon as they both watch its slow downward spiral. Lucifer makes a soft noise of surprise, maybe delight. "I hope you'll forgive me," he says in that easy voice, smooth and measured, compassionate. "But I only want a taste."
And Sam is dying then, is losing all of his air and the rhythm in his veins because Lucifer raises his hand and timidly, thoughtfully licks at the red there. He hums in approval before slipping his thumb fully past his lips this time, sucking away any trace of the warm blood seeped into the ridges of his fingerprint, coiling toward the slender bones of his wrist in a narrow drip.
It's too familiar, too much of a reciprocation of himself, and Sam can't watch but he can't look away either.
Lucifer makes another quiet noise as he pulls his thumb free and levels a stare, heavy with hunger, at Sam's face. "You're so sweet," he says, like he's just made a discovery no one ever has before. He sounds surprised, intrigued; Sam feels horrified, feels gutted and defenseless and uncontrollable.
He doesn't move when Lucifer fills the space between them. A fever-hot hand slips along the back of his neck and buries gently in his hair, another one that's too warm, too solid and stony, touching his jaw with tentative fingers. Sam's mouth breaks open with a sigh as the warm wetness of a tongue squirms along his cheek, tracing the jagged line of the cut and lapping away the blood already congealed there.
He doesn't know what to do with his hands because this is Lucifer in front of him. To grab him would be needy, borderline desperate. Sam wants nothing more than to clutch handfuls of Lucifer's shirt, the fabric he already knows the feel of from how he's slipped it down pale arms before, but he can't, he can't.
Lucifer dips his tongue in the wound and sighs a hot plume of breath against Sam's cheek, licks all the blood away but leaves the gash unhealed just like Sam asked. When Sam is nearly lost to fisting his hands in Lucifer's shirt, dragging him closer, mashing their mouths together - and it would hurt at first, it always hurts when Lucifer doesn't expect it, but then he'll melt and soften back into his human husk and he will kiss Sam so thoroughly and perfectly that Sam almost forgets he is what he is - the slickness of Lucifer's tongue withdraws and instead he leans close to Sam's ear, tasting the shell of it. "Your brother is coming," he whispers.
He pulls back and stares at Sam, and for a moment it's terrifying because Sam can see all the dimensions of what he is - fury and light and angel and warrior and child and brother, son, lover. For a moment Sam sees more than just a portion of himself staring into him. He sees anger, betrayal, devotion, impossible depths of love. He sees God and he sees Dean and he sees Castiel and Dad and Jess and Ellen and Jo and dark shapes like Lilith and red shapes like Ruby. He sees everything and he sees nothing in the same instant, all existence condensed into a strange hue of blue, everything he is and might be and won't be, everything he's lost, everything he's had. Everything he wants.
Lucifer blinks and cradles his face in both hands, then kisses Sam on the lips once, chaste.
He disappears within a heartbeat but Sam can still feel the electricity of him singing through his body, sailing along every nerve. When Dean arrives five minutes later, Sam still tastes the stain of his own blood on his lips, sharp and metallic. Familiar. Pure. Shameful.
~ ~ ~
He sleeps soundly in a dreamless slumber for most of the night.
When Lucifer finally arrives, Sam fights the urge to ask where he's been. Lucifer must hear the thought anyway, because he breathes out a laugh and shakes his head; neither of them address it.
The world is sprawling and open in front of them as they sit on the balcony of a nondescript house, Sam's legs dangling in free air from between termite-gnawed railings. The boards that he leans his hands on don't feel sturdy, dryrotted and creaking under his weight. It's nighttime and everything is blue, everything but the towering column of a lighthouse that spins and spins on an axis and occasionally blinds Sam with a sudden flood of white light. He doesn't know why he dreamt this place up - a dilapidated house with a rotten porch and ivy stalking up the sides, magnolia trees hanging over one end of the veranda. It's nowhere he's been before but he doesn't ask why, or where.
Lucifer folds up next to him on the creaking boards, crossing his legs under him; Indian-style, Sam called it when he was a kid, from the goofy cartoons of Thanksgiving Indians folded up braiding each others' hair or shucking corn or something as equally normative. Lucifer breaks a twig from the magnolia tree and it shudders and shakes, sways as it returns to its original position.
He twists the leaf stalk lazily around his finger until it breaks off with a quiet snap. They both watch as it flutters off the edge of the balcony onto the clean white sand below, anchored in place until a gust of salt wind sweeps through and carries it out of sight.
"Where is this place?" Lucifer asks after a long silence hangs between them. The twig still rests idly in his hand, forgotten in the pale curves of his fingers.
Sam doesn't look at him. "Thought you were the one picking our romantic rendezvous." He doesn't smile either, but Lucifer catches the dry humor of the remark. He laughs, gentle and fond.
"No, Sam. I'm only visiting."
A breeze rattles through and the house moans at their backs. It sounds ready to fall down any second, as if the sudden burst of the lighthouse's strobe will be enough to topple it over. Sam stretches out on his back, pillowing his arms behind his head. "There's no moon," he says. "Or stars."
Lucifer follows him down with a sigh, though he stays on his side facing Sam instead of lying flat. He moves in Sam's periphery, bending to look up at the blank slate of sky that's too solid and limitless to be real. "Guess you forgot to hang them."
Sam smiles, just briefly, smiles at the simplicity of the words. Smiles at the things the devil feeds him in his dreams.
He stops smiling and shuts his eyes.
"You're so willing to give yourself over in every other regard." The pressure of a single finger skates down the center of Sam's breastbone, over his stomach before coming to rest on his hip. Lucifer is leaning on one elbow, fist fit into the dent of his temple, when Sam opens his eyes. He taps his fingers in a slow rhythm, just once.
Sam sighs. "You don't give up easy, do you?"
"And you don't give in."
"Runs in the family."
If Sam didn't know any better, he would think the smile and nod Lucifer gives in return is understanding. He stares at him as Lucifer watches the movement of his own hand on Sam's hip, tracing web-light shapes and circles into his shirt before pushing at its hem, slipping barely beneath it. When he first reaches skin, Lucifer seems satisfied and stills his hand. Sam shivers and wants to move away, but doesn't.
"Why do you do this? Dream-stalk me, I mean."
"Because I want to." It is soft and simple and honest, and Sam remembers something, words from a long time ago - I will never lie to you, I will never trick you.
Lucifer's fingers are warm and tentative beneath Sam's shirt, thrumming with energy. "Do you actually think I'll say it any easier if you hang out in my head long enough?"
We're not friends, he almost says, but then he's not sure they're enemies either.
"No." The five points of pressure sweep along the curve of Sam's belly, up in a smooth glide until they're mapping the faint ridges of his ribs. "It's because I want to. Honest. I find you fascinating, Sam. Especially here, where you're not leashed by your brother."
"Hey," Sam immediately snaps. He knocks Lucifer's hand away and sits up, shoving his shirt down where it belongs. "I'm not leashed."
"You certainly are," Lucifer answers, and his tone is so open and sincere and oddly regretful that Sam can't even think of a response.
Lucifer says, "Lie back down," and Sam does. He pushes Sam's shirt right back up where it was and resumes tracing his original paths.
"You're so weird," Sam says honestly. "You freak me out."
"Would you like me to go?"
Sam doesn't know how to, can't, answer. Because Lucifer is evil and manipulative and wrong, but Sam gets something here, something he doesn't get other places. He finds conversation and acceptance, understanding, pleasure, release, flight. This thing that they have isn't friendship. It isn't even the prelude to a friendship. It isn't ownership or companionship, it isn't sex even when it is. It's... Sam doesn't know what it is. Lucifer is sin and wrath and temptation made flesh, the serpent in the garden.
And Sam really has to remember to stop thinking things like this when Lucifer is in his head, because as soon as he thinks this, Lucifer is sliding a fingertip along Sam's jaw and saying, "You're the apple."
Sam turns into the touch without admitting as much to himself. He narrows his eyes. "Wouldn't I be Eve? Since you're trying to tempt me."
"You think this is seduction, what we do?"
Sam rails against the strange jolt of excitement that darts along his spine. "I don't know what this is."
Lucifer's hand, always too hot, burning from within like his bones are on fire, finds Sam's throat and rests there. "It is what it is."
It's so simple and complete and right, and Sam falls into it, he moves into Lucifer's space and closes his mouth over his, licks at his lips that taste like exactly nothing.
Lucifer kisses like he does everything else when he's exploring Sam's body - when he's memorizing the shape of his hands or the taste of his throat, or when he's dragging the weight of Sam's cock over the flat of his tongue, or when he's fucking him good enough for Sam to see stars - slow and controlled and complete, tasting every inch of Sam's mouth he can get. It's not enough and Sam surges up, swallows the small sound Lucifer makes against his mouth and does his best to devour him whole.
He thinks Ruby maybe broke him. Ruby and her dark nails and lies and frantic, animal sex. And she was good, she was delicious and wild and insatiable, but she was also filthy and depraved and demonic, built of pure sin and instinct wrapped around the bright core of a lie. Lucifer is slow and careful and lavishes so much attention on Sam sometimes he thinks he's imploding with it. Lucifer is all grace and light and patience that's been honed over millennia of waiting.
He is all of this and yet he is pure power too, a terrible devastating force that rocks through Sam and leaves him shaking and afraid.
Lucifer backs Sam up until he is flat against the creaking boards beneath his shoulders, and draws all the air from his lungs and shoots lightning into his blood.
Sam makes an undignified sound as he clutches at the fabric in his grip, at the arms beneath it, solid as granite in a wholly alien way. He says something that may be please, though he decides he'd rather not know for certain, and bends and gasps when Lucifer's teeth flash in the dark to find the tender hollow just above his jugular. Sam's pulsebeat skip-stutters, rushes and goes wild, and Lucifer licks the flesh between his teeth and some tiny part of Sam flares hungry and alive.
But then the pressure leaves and Lucifer withdraws, fitting his fingertips against the divots left on Sam's throat. "You're healed," he says quietly, thoughtfully.
"What?"
A finger slides along the line of his cheekbone, from the hard arch of it to the corner of his mouth that opens softly with want. Lucifer repeats, "You're healed," and Sam sucks the tip of his finger in, laves it with his tongue and watches the want and fascination flit darkly across bottomless blue eyes. It tastes bitter and herbal from the magnolia sprig, and Sam only remembers after the fact that magnolia is poisonous, but it's not enough to make him pull away.
"S'a dream," Sam slurs. Another finger comes up and he pulls that one in too, curls his tongue around and between, wet enough that it leaves twin trails of moisture along his face when they pull away.
"I so enjoyed the taste of you," Lucifer says, close to Sam's mouth but not quite, not quite -
"I'd like to open you again," he says in a whisper, and Sam shudders like he's just been born. Lucifer is nearer in an instant, the roll of his shoulders beneath Sam's palms fluid and catlike, hissing a breath in around the marble-white canines that only just left Sam's throat, that were so close to puncturing and breaking open, so close Sam can feel it in the back of his skull, in the floor of his hips.
He whines and arches, lifts his hips and squeezes flesh that has no give, but then he feels Lucifer's fingers light on his forehead, stretching the world to a thin film and drawing him out like a frayed thread pulled from a spool.
It's a blinding flare like the lighthouse's spill, like being baptized in pure sunlight. Lucifer touches him lightly, reverently - his eyes, his lips, the hollow of his throat - and his mouth moves languidly against Sam's chest when he says his name and wraps a hand around the demanding hard curve of him. It's white and exhilarating and primal, inexplicable and Sam loves it even when he knows he shouldn't. When he knows it's temptation and manipulation and wrongwrongwrong.
He tries to say as much by pushing against Lucifer's shoulders, but a twist of the wrist, a flick of the tongue and he's pulling again, a constant limbo. Sam doesn't think he'll ever be able to make up his mind.
It feels like falling when he comes, slick and sudden between them, and Sam wonders if this is anything like the state of being perpetually touched by Lucifer, of being fused to and obliterated by him, and he wonders, he really does. He considers.
"God," Sam sighs as his skull thumps against the damp balcony slats. Lucifer laughs, a dark and slippery sound, into the crook of his neck, wraps a sticky hand around Sam's hip and it blazes like a sonic heat, his grip scalding in all the right ways.
It's right and it's wrong and it's nothing and it's chaos and Sam is a mess and he's got his hands on Lucifer's shoulder, on his cock, he's actually moaning into it when Lucifer kisses him hard enough to bloom blood between them. Sam's panicking because he's not sure if it's his blood or if it's Lucifer's, and if it's not his then he's going to burn, and oh god, he's going to burn anyway, isn't he?
There is a hand on his hip and a wetness on his stomach and the sharpness of teeth scraping his tongue in a filthy, possessive kind of way, and Sam doesn't know, he feels like a hole's been blown right through him and he just doesn't know.
After Lucifer moves away from him and Sam is sitting against the vertical rails again, splinters pushing into his temples where he's leaned against them, he thinks about how it would change the ocean if there really wasn't a moon. Lucifer hasn't spoken a word in hours but he has remained, silent and inconceivably patient with his fingers on Sam's back or in Sam's hair or sweeping beneath the hem of his shirt. Simple, exploratory touches like he just can't keep his hands away, like he wants so bad and it hurts that he can't own. It should make Sam feel victorious, but it doesn't.
Hours shift pass and the air stays blue and dark, but Sam doesn't find it strange. Time doesn't pass in dreams like it does in reality, and by the time Lucifer turns one of Sam's hands over to map the long tender line of his wrist, it's daylight in the real world but unchanged here. Lucifer chases the pale blue vein from the meat of Sam's thumb to the crook of his elbow and says, "It's morning."
Eventually Sam says, "I don't want you here."
Lucifer sounds the same, even and unperturbed, when he speaks. "It's your dream."
"I want to wake up alone," Sam sighs.
Lucifer pets the ladder of Sam's ribs, slow like he's counting the individual distentions, and breathes, twists Sam's hair between fingers still ripe with crushed magnolia blossoms and sweat. "Would you like me to go now?"
Sam shuts his eyes and bites his tongue that still tastes like iron. "Yes," he says as the lighthouse spins past again, just a quick flash in the vast dark.
It's such an easy word, such a small word. It rolls off his tongue with the grace of a waterdrop, the weight of a wing. Sam closes his palms around the slats bracing his forehead and squeezes until they give, squeezes until the flesh breaks and the chipped white paint is smeared in red. He braces for the twist of his words, waits for Lucifer to say that's all I needed and smother him into oblivion.
But it's vacant and quiet behind him when he turns, and Sam is alone and belongs to himself.
Lucifer gives him freely what he wants; he doesn't turn Sam's yes into the yes, and Sam is terrified but also, abstractedly, relieved. Grateful. Willing to perhaps, if only a little, trust.
He suspects the slip won't last forever, but this time Lucifer is gone without argument or betrayal. He disappears on the whip of a breeze as if he were never there at all, but even after he's gone Sam can still feel him there, feeding on his blood and burned into his flesh, a constant presence, an inevitability, curled into the salt-smelling air and housed permanent in his spine.
Title: We Won't Pass This Way Again (so kiss me with your mouth open)
Rating: R
Pairing/Characters: Sam/Lucifer, mentions of Sam/Ruby; Dean, Lucifer, Sam, mentions of others.
Warnings: Adult language, sexuality, slight bloodplay, Lucifer being a fucking creep.
Words: 5,889
Summary: You know how they say you can kill someone with kindness? Well, Sam's finding out the hard way that patience and understanding can be just as lethal.
A/N: Written for my ~demanding sister with the prompts "candles" and "herbs" (well, hey, it's not herbs but it's got a plant, okay?). This is also somehow my first official Sam/Lucifer fic. Huh.
Endless thanks and ~cottage-grown flowers go to devilyouwere for hand-holding, beta-ing, and being an awesomely supportive insomniac with me. ♥
If we live to see the other side of this,
I will remember your kiss
So do it with your mouth open
And take your foot off of the brake
For christ's sake
- "Dilaudid," The Mountain Goats
~ ~ ~
Each time he finds him on the outlands of sleep, when Sam has just melted over the line of awareness and slipped into the haze where he waits, folded into a human body, patient and undemanding. He smiles when Sam turns to him, lifts a hand and lays it on Sam's face, twisted with fury and deliberation, with I shouldn't, this is wrong - a soft hand, an accepting hand. One that says I know you, I know your flaws and accept them willingly.
Sam allows those doubts and imperfections, all that anger that buzzes constantly within his ribs, to pour down Lucifer's throat when he fuses his mouth to Sam's and kisses away the world.
He is far gentler than the devil has any right to be. Not like Ruby, not sparking with mischief and lust. Lucifer is quiet and careful, content to explore Sam's body as if he has never laid eyes on human flesh before, as if he has never touched anything quite so magnificent, as if he is constantly hungry for more.
As if he covets.
Lucifer wrings a gamut of sounds from Sam's throat, breathless pants and keens, simple words of want and contrition, some of defiance, others of pleading. There is only one syllable that never falls from his mouth, no matter how it claws at his throat or how completely Lucifer unravels him.
~ ~ ~
Dean gives him a sidelong look as they slide into the Impala for another day of rambling through back country. The day is bright and sharp in Sam's eyes, the sunlight scalding as it glances off the hood. He roots past crumpled paper cups and old cell phones, a Desert Eagle, a pack of unsmoked cigarettes, bags of salt and ketchup packets until he finds a scratched pair of cheap sunglasses. They hook around his ears crooked and they're smeared with greasy fingerprints and scored with deep scratches, but they serve to smother the light if only a little.
Sam sighs and hunches deep into the leather that moulds itself flawlessly to his body after so many years.
"You catch a bug or something?" Dean asks. Sam doesn't have to look at him to see the crease burying itself between his eyebrows, how his eyes get a little clearer, a little greener, when he worries and tries not to show it.
Sam shakes his head and snaps his seatbelt over his chest. "Just tired," he answers. Dean seems unsatisfied but there are no more words to say, nothing that could explain his retreat into petrified silence.
The Brian Jonestown Massacre drags him into a doze while they zip down the I-30 towards the yawning copper mines of West Texas. Lucifer is already waiting for him when he blurs over the horizon of sleep.
It is a nondescript room, one akin to every moldy, dank motel he has spent most of his life in. He can no longer tell them apart; every room, every state, every bed that's more like a back brace than a mattress becomes the same after a while. After twenty-six years Sam wouldn't say he's so much used to it as he is resigned to apathy. It's a place to sleep, and more than that he's still miraculously alive to be able to sleep at all, so he thinks it would be pretty ungrateful to start complaining now.
"You're here," he says, the sound weak and soft as it falls into the space between them. Lucifer sits in a chair near the door, ankle slung casually onto a knee, hands folded together across the subtle round of his stomach.
"I am here."
He smiles, seemingly pleased that Sam is here. Energy, awareness crackles in the air between them. They both know where this will end; it's only a question of how to begin.
Lucifer never pushes, he never coaxes Sam into doing anything he doesn't want to. He simply waits, and accepts, and moves fluently when Sam inevitably makes the first move.
This time, Sam resolves he won't.
He takes a seat on the far bed and clears the thickness from his throat. He finds himself wanting inexplicably to reach, to touch, but before it shifts from want to action he sandwiches his hands between his knees. It falls quiet, sunlight edging in around closed blinds and thin curtains, dust motes swirling in the air, Lucifer's thumbs twiddling in small movements against one another.
"You're tired," he says eventually.
Sam shrugs and watches a car go by in the parking lot; he doesn't know if the car is there because his subconscious thinks it should be, or if this is really some physical realm that Lucifer has created, maybe a memory. He studies the olive carpet and it's nothing he remembers - the beige chairs, the faded maroon bedspreads. This isn't a place he's been before.
"Where are we?"
Lucifer pulls up one shoulder and blinks slowly, slow enough that Sam sees the sunlight sliding along the blond curves of his eyelashes. "Nowhere. Anywhere."
It doesn't make sense and Sam wants, he needs -
"Why are you tired?" Lucifer asks. Sam thinks he probably already knows, he must, but there is a genuine edge of concern in his voice, a soft sincerity that Sam hasn't felt since California and a life with a beautiful girl, a life built on a lie.
Sam shrugs and stares at the carpet and pushes his thumb hard into the hollow of his palm. "Tired of running, I guess."
"Then stop."
He snorts weakly. "You would say that."
Lucifer's head tilts as his eyes slant into curious commas. "Why would I want that?"
"Why wouldn't you?"
"I want you to be healthy, Sam."
"Right, right. And by that, you mean you want me to get all rested up so I can be in tip-top condition when you jump into my body."
"No," Lucifer drawls patiently, tone slightly admonishing. "I want you to rest because you're grouchy when you don't sleep."
A long slow smile and Sam's hands leave his knees, reach out -
The door slams shut with a bang and Dean's fist taps the roof three times in succession. Sam jerks awake hard enough that his face nearly meets the dash.
"Look alive, Sammy, we got butts to kick."
Sam watches his brother's back bob and dip as he walks toward the motel office. Dean is so oblivious and scared and angry that sometimes Sam feels it in the deepest marrow of his bones. It's familiar enough that he sometimes feels like he's staring straight into a mirror instead of at Dean; familiar enough that sometimes he wonders how they can even tell themselves apart from each other anymore.
~ ~ ~
They split up on the hunt because Dean is learning to trust Sam again, he's learning to be confident in Sam's abilities to take care of things again. Dean canvases the town, sleek in his stolen rental suit and shining car, while Sam pokes around the warehouse where demons have been getting up to no good. A ten-foot sigil tattoos the concrete floor, streaked with blood from the half-rotten carcass of a pig that's been shoved into a far corner. It reeks like death enough that Sam has to cover his nose with the sleeve of his jacket so as not to retch.
He's fishing through the backlog of information in his head, trying to match the sigil with something he's studied before, when the demons show up.
The far wall vibrates with a huge clatter as the steel door falls. Sam spins and whips his knife through the air, but there's nothing for it since in the same instant the lights cave in and the warehouse goes solid black. Sam calls, "Who's there?" even though he knows what this is.
It's a trap. They laid a perfect plan and Sam swallowed the hook like an amateur. He should have recognized the signs - the carvings of Winchester into each victims' body, the epidemic spread of rumours that he and Dean were working on the side of the demons now. It should have sent up a red flag that this was pure and simple bait, but in his eagerness to prove that he could do this, that Dean could trust him, he'd slipped and stumbled right into their net.
An oily laugh seeps through the darkness at Sam's back, spinning him in another one-eighty. The candles dotting the perimeter of the sigil flicker to life all at once, orange-white flames springing up of their own accord to slowly digest brittle wicks and softened wax. The demon is a man, is wearing a man, a middle-aged one with Levi's and a pinstripe workshirt. Sam feels a momentary stab of ache for this man and his family. He won't be coming out of this alive; another fallen innocent, and this, this is what they're fighting to stop.
"Well that was easier than expected," the demon says with a country twang. Another one appears at his back, then another, and another, a whole pack of them sniffing and salivating, licking their chops, impatient for the kill. Sam can smell their hunger from here.
"I'll kill you if you take another step," he says with false bravado. The knife hilt is warm in his palm, solid and promising. He can get them if they come close, one or two at a time, but there's fourteen of them now and they just keep coming out of the woodwork. It's not looking good. "Every last one of you."
A woman with ginger hair and bottomless black eyes moves to the forefront, a purr lilting out of her painted lips. "Oooh, little Sammy Winchester. Always so ready to cut to the main event." She steps closer, hovering just out of arms' reach, and waggles her breasts obscenely at him. "Not even a little foreplay?"
Her laugh becomes a chorus of them. Sam shivers and resituates the knife in his grip. "What the hell do you want?"
"Well, you of course," the first demon says.
"And you took the cheese so beautifully, too," the ginger-haired woman says.
Sam forces a laugh. "It won't be that easy."
"Oh yeah," Ginger moans as she sidles closer, close enough to skim a French-tipped nail along Sam's collarbone. "Big strong man -"
She doesn't get to finish because Sam right hooks her in the jaw and plants the knife deep in the pit of her belly. Pulses of light eat her up from the inside as she wriggles and scratches at Sam's face, catching him just hard enough once to tear a line of red into his skin from cheekbone to the corner of his mouth.
The other demons charge and in the space it takes for Sam to jerk the knife out of Ginger's limp corpse and to think, I'm fucked, every body in front of him suddenly freezes and crumples and pours out a scream filled with more pain than Sam's ever heard, the kind of scream you only hear in Hell itself.
The demons' eyes burn out, their tongues catch on fire, their flesh melts and fuses to their bones and their bones fuse to the floor. It's a horrifying thing to watch. Sam stumbles and stops breathing and wheels clumsily around when the weight of a hand descends on his shoulder.
The blade buries to the hilt between Lucifer's eight and ninth ribs, but he only responds by glancing at it in little more than curiosity. His lips curve into a simple smile as he withdraws it slowly and hands it back to Sam, blunt side first.
Sam smells blood and metal and an old hunger wells within him. The shame of it is crushing but he can't help but wonder - wonder what it must be like, taste like.
Lucifer laughs unexpectedly, the sound of it hushed. "Oh no, I'm afraid not."
"Get out of my head," Sam snaps on instinct.
"It would burn you alive," Lucifer says, voice dropped low as he bends to touch his fingertips to one of the demons' corpses. Beneath his touch, it shrinks and falls into a tiny pile of ash in the vague shape of a human. "From the inside out," he continues as he disposes of the others. A quick cut of eyes in Sam's direction, then, "You're not ready yet. Give it time."
The last one he burns is the red-haired woman at Sam's feet, though he hesitates when he reaches her. He kneels and stares at her, worrying a corner of his lip between his teeth in a habit too common, too human for something as monstrous as he.
"She didn't have any children," Lucifer says quietly. Sam watches as he brushes a tendril of flame-red hair from the woman's forehead. "She had a sister, though. And a cat."
He touches two fingers to her cheek and she just goes away, transforming immediately into a shapeless pile of gray dust.
Lucifer looks up at him then, staring up from his knees, and Sam loses his breath.
"You're welcome," he says flatly.
Sam almost smiles, though he doesn't know why. "You saved me. Why? You could have let them take me - that sigil, that's basically mind control in a box. They were going to make me say it."
Lucifer shrugs but doesn't rise. "I wouldn't have let them do that to you."
"But it would get you my body, isn't that what you're gunning for?"
"Mind control isn't permission, Sam."
"But it's a... convenient loophole. You seem like the type who would take advantage of that." Sam bites down on his tongue. He doesn't know why he's standing here giving the devil suggestions on how to steal his body right out of his grasp. It's ridiculous and Dean would kill him if he knew, but Lucifer is still on his knees in front of Sam and he's just so easy to talk to, so very easy.
Lucifer looks briefly taken aback. "The type?"
Sam shrugs. "Well, you know. Satan."
This time it's a laugh, simple and carefree. "Ah, yes. The old names." He rises to his feet with a grace too fluid to be governed by human muscles. Sam suddenly feels both huge and clumsy and too small at once. "Morningstar. Iblis. Serpens niquissimus. Der Leibhaftige." He chuckles at the last one. "I do have a proper name. People seem to... forget."
Sam watches him move closer. There's nothing more terrible than this beast in front of him, yet even as he moves into Sam's space there is no hint of a threat rolling from Lucifer. Only a pervading electricity, a rattling hum like the gather of energy before a storm. A serenity. A... fascination.
Lucifer's eyes shift pointedly to the line of blood Sam can feel sneaking down his face. "Would you like me to take care of that for you?"
"No," Sam barks, then repeats himself more quietly. "No."
"Does it hurt?"
Sam angles away from the weight of Lucifer's gaze. It's unnerving, being the sole object of his attentions. He thinks of an ant under a magnifying glass, burning alive with the sun refracted through the lens. "I'll live."
Lucifer nods understandingly. He's quiet for a long moment before drawing a sudden breath. "Pain is such a curious thing. I should like to experience it myself."
Sam knows he should laugh. He knows he should snort and spit back some witty retort that promises copious pain and destruction in his future. He knows he should say that he'll see to it that Lucifer gets to experience more than his fair share of pain before the end. He knows he should say this because this is what Dean would say - Dean, all brawn and fire and denial. Dean who doesn't face up to reality when it's too hard for him to accept. Dean who believes, for some reason, that they're going to make it out of this alive, and so Sam believes it too.
But he doesn't say any of these things, and soon Lucifer is speaking again, raising a hand near his face and asking, "May I?"
Sam opens his mouth to speak, but no sound comes. His jaw works and closes again. He is held, pinned in place by the hooded stare Lucifer is piercing into him, curious and patient and, oh god, seeking permission that Sam wants desperately to give.
He doesn't say yes because he can never say yes to Lucifer, but Lucifer reaches out, all the same. He trails the calloused curve of his thumb along Sam's face, catching a sweep of blood from the hollow beneath his cheekbone. For a fleeting moment Sam thinks Lucifer is healing the wound, so he quickly says, "I don't want to owe you any favors."
Lucifer's hand pauses on his face. His gaze moves, smooth as liquid, to Sam's eyes before returning to his cheek. "No," he says distractedly. "I supposed you wouldn't."
The sting of the cut is still there when Lucifer's hand pulls back. Blood coils along his thumb in a thin ribbon as they both watch its slow downward spiral. Lucifer makes a soft noise of surprise, maybe delight. "I hope you'll forgive me," he says in that easy voice, smooth and measured, compassionate. "But I only want a taste."
And Sam is dying then, is losing all of his air and the rhythm in his veins because Lucifer raises his hand and timidly, thoughtfully licks at the red there. He hums in approval before slipping his thumb fully past his lips this time, sucking away any trace of the warm blood seeped into the ridges of his fingerprint, coiling toward the slender bones of his wrist in a narrow drip.
It's too familiar, too much of a reciprocation of himself, and Sam can't watch but he can't look away either.
Lucifer makes another quiet noise as he pulls his thumb free and levels a stare, heavy with hunger, at Sam's face. "You're so sweet," he says, like he's just made a discovery no one ever has before. He sounds surprised, intrigued; Sam feels horrified, feels gutted and defenseless and uncontrollable.
He doesn't move when Lucifer fills the space between them. A fever-hot hand slips along the back of his neck and buries gently in his hair, another one that's too warm, too solid and stony, touching his jaw with tentative fingers. Sam's mouth breaks open with a sigh as the warm wetness of a tongue squirms along his cheek, tracing the jagged line of the cut and lapping away the blood already congealed there.
He doesn't know what to do with his hands because this is Lucifer in front of him. To grab him would be needy, borderline desperate. Sam wants nothing more than to clutch handfuls of Lucifer's shirt, the fabric he already knows the feel of from how he's slipped it down pale arms before, but he can't, he can't.
Lucifer dips his tongue in the wound and sighs a hot plume of breath against Sam's cheek, licks all the blood away but leaves the gash unhealed just like Sam asked. When Sam is nearly lost to fisting his hands in Lucifer's shirt, dragging him closer, mashing their mouths together - and it would hurt at first, it always hurts when Lucifer doesn't expect it, but then he'll melt and soften back into his human husk and he will kiss Sam so thoroughly and perfectly that Sam almost forgets he is what he is - the slickness of Lucifer's tongue withdraws and instead he leans close to Sam's ear, tasting the shell of it. "Your brother is coming," he whispers.
He pulls back and stares at Sam, and for a moment it's terrifying because Sam can see all the dimensions of what he is - fury and light and angel and warrior and child and brother, son, lover. For a moment Sam sees more than just a portion of himself staring into him. He sees anger, betrayal, devotion, impossible depths of love. He sees God and he sees Dean and he sees Castiel and Dad and Jess and Ellen and Jo and dark shapes like Lilith and red shapes like Ruby. He sees everything and he sees nothing in the same instant, all existence condensed into a strange hue of blue, everything he is and might be and won't be, everything he's lost, everything he's had. Everything he wants.
Lucifer blinks and cradles his face in both hands, then kisses Sam on the lips once, chaste.
He disappears within a heartbeat but Sam can still feel the electricity of him singing through his body, sailing along every nerve. When Dean arrives five minutes later, Sam still tastes the stain of his own blood on his lips, sharp and metallic. Familiar. Pure. Shameful.
~ ~ ~
He sleeps soundly in a dreamless slumber for most of the night.
When Lucifer finally arrives, Sam fights the urge to ask where he's been. Lucifer must hear the thought anyway, because he breathes out a laugh and shakes his head; neither of them address it.
The world is sprawling and open in front of them as they sit on the balcony of a nondescript house, Sam's legs dangling in free air from between termite-gnawed railings. The boards that he leans his hands on don't feel sturdy, dryrotted and creaking under his weight. It's nighttime and everything is blue, everything but the towering column of a lighthouse that spins and spins on an axis and occasionally blinds Sam with a sudden flood of white light. He doesn't know why he dreamt this place up - a dilapidated house with a rotten porch and ivy stalking up the sides, magnolia trees hanging over one end of the veranda. It's nowhere he's been before but he doesn't ask why, or where.
Lucifer folds up next to him on the creaking boards, crossing his legs under him; Indian-style, Sam called it when he was a kid, from the goofy cartoons of Thanksgiving Indians folded up braiding each others' hair or shucking corn or something as equally normative. Lucifer breaks a twig from the magnolia tree and it shudders and shakes, sways as it returns to its original position.
He twists the leaf stalk lazily around his finger until it breaks off with a quiet snap. They both watch as it flutters off the edge of the balcony onto the clean white sand below, anchored in place until a gust of salt wind sweeps through and carries it out of sight.
"Where is this place?" Lucifer asks after a long silence hangs between them. The twig still rests idly in his hand, forgotten in the pale curves of his fingers.
Sam doesn't look at him. "Thought you were the one picking our romantic rendezvous." He doesn't smile either, but Lucifer catches the dry humor of the remark. He laughs, gentle and fond.
"No, Sam. I'm only visiting."
A breeze rattles through and the house moans at their backs. It sounds ready to fall down any second, as if the sudden burst of the lighthouse's strobe will be enough to topple it over. Sam stretches out on his back, pillowing his arms behind his head. "There's no moon," he says. "Or stars."
Lucifer follows him down with a sigh, though he stays on his side facing Sam instead of lying flat. He moves in Sam's periphery, bending to look up at the blank slate of sky that's too solid and limitless to be real. "Guess you forgot to hang them."
Sam smiles, just briefly, smiles at the simplicity of the words. Smiles at the things the devil feeds him in his dreams.
He stops smiling and shuts his eyes.
"You're so willing to give yourself over in every other regard." The pressure of a single finger skates down the center of Sam's breastbone, over his stomach before coming to rest on his hip. Lucifer is leaning on one elbow, fist fit into the dent of his temple, when Sam opens his eyes. He taps his fingers in a slow rhythm, just once.
Sam sighs. "You don't give up easy, do you?"
"And you don't give in."
"Runs in the family."
If Sam didn't know any better, he would think the smile and nod Lucifer gives in return is understanding. He stares at him as Lucifer watches the movement of his own hand on Sam's hip, tracing web-light shapes and circles into his shirt before pushing at its hem, slipping barely beneath it. When he first reaches skin, Lucifer seems satisfied and stills his hand. Sam shivers and wants to move away, but doesn't.
"Why do you do this? Dream-stalk me, I mean."
"Because I want to." It is soft and simple and honest, and Sam remembers something, words from a long time ago - I will never lie to you, I will never trick you.
Lucifer's fingers are warm and tentative beneath Sam's shirt, thrumming with energy. "Do you actually think I'll say it any easier if you hang out in my head long enough?"
We're not friends, he almost says, but then he's not sure they're enemies either.
"No." The five points of pressure sweep along the curve of Sam's belly, up in a smooth glide until they're mapping the faint ridges of his ribs. "It's because I want to. Honest. I find you fascinating, Sam. Especially here, where you're not leashed by your brother."
"Hey," Sam immediately snaps. He knocks Lucifer's hand away and sits up, shoving his shirt down where it belongs. "I'm not leashed."
"You certainly are," Lucifer answers, and his tone is so open and sincere and oddly regretful that Sam can't even think of a response.
Lucifer says, "Lie back down," and Sam does. He pushes Sam's shirt right back up where it was and resumes tracing his original paths.
"You're so weird," Sam says honestly. "You freak me out."
"Would you like me to go?"
Sam doesn't know how to, can't, answer. Because Lucifer is evil and manipulative and wrong, but Sam gets something here, something he doesn't get other places. He finds conversation and acceptance, understanding, pleasure, release, flight. This thing that they have isn't friendship. It isn't even the prelude to a friendship. It isn't ownership or companionship, it isn't sex even when it is. It's... Sam doesn't know what it is. Lucifer is sin and wrath and temptation made flesh, the serpent in the garden.
And Sam really has to remember to stop thinking things like this when Lucifer is in his head, because as soon as he thinks this, Lucifer is sliding a fingertip along Sam's jaw and saying, "You're the apple."
Sam turns into the touch without admitting as much to himself. He narrows his eyes. "Wouldn't I be Eve? Since you're trying to tempt me."
"You think this is seduction, what we do?"
Sam rails against the strange jolt of excitement that darts along his spine. "I don't know what this is."
Lucifer's hand, always too hot, burning from within like his bones are on fire, finds Sam's throat and rests there. "It is what it is."
It's so simple and complete and right, and Sam falls into it, he moves into Lucifer's space and closes his mouth over his, licks at his lips that taste like exactly nothing.
Lucifer kisses like he does everything else when he's exploring Sam's body - when he's memorizing the shape of his hands or the taste of his throat, or when he's dragging the weight of Sam's cock over the flat of his tongue, or when he's fucking him good enough for Sam to see stars - slow and controlled and complete, tasting every inch of Sam's mouth he can get. It's not enough and Sam surges up, swallows the small sound Lucifer makes against his mouth and does his best to devour him whole.
He thinks Ruby maybe broke him. Ruby and her dark nails and lies and frantic, animal sex. And she was good, she was delicious and wild and insatiable, but she was also filthy and depraved and demonic, built of pure sin and instinct wrapped around the bright core of a lie. Lucifer is slow and careful and lavishes so much attention on Sam sometimes he thinks he's imploding with it. Lucifer is all grace and light and patience that's been honed over millennia of waiting.
He is all of this and yet he is pure power too, a terrible devastating force that rocks through Sam and leaves him shaking and afraid.
Lucifer backs Sam up until he is flat against the creaking boards beneath his shoulders, and draws all the air from his lungs and shoots lightning into his blood.
Sam makes an undignified sound as he clutches at the fabric in his grip, at the arms beneath it, solid as granite in a wholly alien way. He says something that may be please, though he decides he'd rather not know for certain, and bends and gasps when Lucifer's teeth flash in the dark to find the tender hollow just above his jugular. Sam's pulsebeat skip-stutters, rushes and goes wild, and Lucifer licks the flesh between his teeth and some tiny part of Sam flares hungry and alive.
But then the pressure leaves and Lucifer withdraws, fitting his fingertips against the divots left on Sam's throat. "You're healed," he says quietly, thoughtfully.
"What?"
A finger slides along the line of his cheekbone, from the hard arch of it to the corner of his mouth that opens softly with want. Lucifer repeats, "You're healed," and Sam sucks the tip of his finger in, laves it with his tongue and watches the want and fascination flit darkly across bottomless blue eyes. It tastes bitter and herbal from the magnolia sprig, and Sam only remembers after the fact that magnolia is poisonous, but it's not enough to make him pull away.
"S'a dream," Sam slurs. Another finger comes up and he pulls that one in too, curls his tongue around and between, wet enough that it leaves twin trails of moisture along his face when they pull away.
"I so enjoyed the taste of you," Lucifer says, close to Sam's mouth but not quite, not quite -
"I'd like to open you again," he says in a whisper, and Sam shudders like he's just been born. Lucifer is nearer in an instant, the roll of his shoulders beneath Sam's palms fluid and catlike, hissing a breath in around the marble-white canines that only just left Sam's throat, that were so close to puncturing and breaking open, so close Sam can feel it in the back of his skull, in the floor of his hips.
He whines and arches, lifts his hips and squeezes flesh that has no give, but then he feels Lucifer's fingers light on his forehead, stretching the world to a thin film and drawing him out like a frayed thread pulled from a spool.
It's a blinding flare like the lighthouse's spill, like being baptized in pure sunlight. Lucifer touches him lightly, reverently - his eyes, his lips, the hollow of his throat - and his mouth moves languidly against Sam's chest when he says his name and wraps a hand around the demanding hard curve of him. It's white and exhilarating and primal, inexplicable and Sam loves it even when he knows he shouldn't. When he knows it's temptation and manipulation and wrongwrongwrong.
He tries to say as much by pushing against Lucifer's shoulders, but a twist of the wrist, a flick of the tongue and he's pulling again, a constant limbo. Sam doesn't think he'll ever be able to make up his mind.
It feels like falling when he comes, slick and sudden between them, and Sam wonders if this is anything like the state of being perpetually touched by Lucifer, of being fused to and obliterated by him, and he wonders, he really does. He considers.
"God," Sam sighs as his skull thumps against the damp balcony slats. Lucifer laughs, a dark and slippery sound, into the crook of his neck, wraps a sticky hand around Sam's hip and it blazes like a sonic heat, his grip scalding in all the right ways.
It's right and it's wrong and it's nothing and it's chaos and Sam is a mess and he's got his hands on Lucifer's shoulder, on his cock, he's actually moaning into it when Lucifer kisses him hard enough to bloom blood between them. Sam's panicking because he's not sure if it's his blood or if it's Lucifer's, and if it's not his then he's going to burn, and oh god, he's going to burn anyway, isn't he?
There is a hand on his hip and a wetness on his stomach and the sharpness of teeth scraping his tongue in a filthy, possessive kind of way, and Sam doesn't know, he feels like a hole's been blown right through him and he just doesn't know.
After Lucifer moves away from him and Sam is sitting against the vertical rails again, splinters pushing into his temples where he's leaned against them, he thinks about how it would change the ocean if there really wasn't a moon. Lucifer hasn't spoken a word in hours but he has remained, silent and inconceivably patient with his fingers on Sam's back or in Sam's hair or sweeping beneath the hem of his shirt. Simple, exploratory touches like he just can't keep his hands away, like he wants so bad and it hurts that he can't own. It should make Sam feel victorious, but it doesn't.
Hours shift pass and the air stays blue and dark, but Sam doesn't find it strange. Time doesn't pass in dreams like it does in reality, and by the time Lucifer turns one of Sam's hands over to map the long tender line of his wrist, it's daylight in the real world but unchanged here. Lucifer chases the pale blue vein from the meat of Sam's thumb to the crook of his elbow and says, "It's morning."
Eventually Sam says, "I don't want you here."
Lucifer sounds the same, even and unperturbed, when he speaks. "It's your dream."
"I want to wake up alone," Sam sighs.
Lucifer pets the ladder of Sam's ribs, slow like he's counting the individual distentions, and breathes, twists Sam's hair between fingers still ripe with crushed magnolia blossoms and sweat. "Would you like me to go now?"
Sam shuts his eyes and bites his tongue that still tastes like iron. "Yes," he says as the lighthouse spins past again, just a quick flash in the vast dark.
It's such an easy word, such a small word. It rolls off his tongue with the grace of a waterdrop, the weight of a wing. Sam closes his palms around the slats bracing his forehead and squeezes until they give, squeezes until the flesh breaks and the chipped white paint is smeared in red. He braces for the twist of his words, waits for Lucifer to say that's all I needed and smother him into oblivion.
But it's vacant and quiet behind him when he turns, and Sam is alone and belongs to himself.
Lucifer gives him freely what he wants; he doesn't turn Sam's yes into the yes, and Sam is terrified but also, abstractedly, relieved. Grateful. Willing to perhaps, if only a little, trust.
He suspects the slip won't last forever, but this time Lucifer is gone without argument or betrayal. He disappears on the whip of a breeze as if he were never there at all, but even after he's gone Sam can still feel him there, feeding on his blood and burned into his flesh, a constant presence, an inevitability, curled into the salt-smelling air and housed permanent in his spine.