Bend the Bracket 6
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16
-- -- --
There had never been a more comfortable bed than the one in the motel room, not to Sam at least, not that night. He sank down on it and shucked off his shoes and his jeans and pulled off his shirt and curled up under the blankets, because the room was very cold, just as it had been outside. Sleep, however, felt distant. So he lay there on the most comfortable mattress ever, just his eyes poking from the covers, and watched the room and the shadows cast by the eerie bluish light of Dean's laptop screen. He didn't know what he was looking for, but the mound of broken chair in the corner wasn't it, and the intense crease of his brother's eyebrows wasn't it, either. Something was missing.
He tried to think about the job, about the little bits of information he'd gleaned from the bar. He couldn't keep his thoughts in order.
And then there was Lucifer. The Devil lurked in the back of his mind, a specter haunting his thoughts. Lucifer had helped him, teased him, and kissed him. What had that been about? Any of that? Sam didn't know. Sam did know that Lucifer wasn't acting like he had been when he'd first showed up as a hallucination, however, and that kind of bothered him. It all came back to something that had been said somewhat casually that hadn't meant much to him at the time.
Lucifer would keep Sam's brain from remembering Hell, from dreaming up visions of the Devil himself. What did that mean?
Why did Sam care?
He buried his face in his pillow. He had made too many stupid decisions to be thinking about trusting the Devil, but he was. After Meg and Azazel and Ruby and being a meat-suit on two separate occasions, he knew it should have been a lesson learned, not something he needed to be reminded of, not something he had to struggle with and fret over. He remembered Hell. He remembered twisting his hand and snapping Bobby's neck, snapping his fingers and exploding Castiel. Those weren't moments that he could forget, even if he hadn't been in the driver's seat for them.
The pillow smelled like blood and soap. He remembered that he'd cut his hand that morning and hadn't had the chance to go down to the front desk for new sheets and a pillow case yet.
If all of those reasons weren't enough, there was still the fact that this was Satan he was thinking about. Likely fake Satan. Not even real Satan.
The kiss had felt pretty real.
If he'd been alone, Sam would have sat up cursing and grumbling and gone and attempted to lose himself in research. But he couldn't do that, now. So instead, he tucked the covers a little more tightly around himself and tried to push Lucifer into a box in his mind and lock him away.
Sleep crept up on him slowly, pulled him down into a spiral that made him think that maybe, if he could let go of the moment, he'd be dreaming, but he hadn't yet. Just dozing. The room around him still looked and felt the same, and he could still hear Dean clicking away at the keyboard.
"It was just a kiss, Sam, not like I asked you to marry me." The voice was just a whisper, just loud enough that he could hear it, and he rolled away from his brother to find Lucifer leaning on the dresser, his arms crossed over his plaid shirt like he was cold.
"And why is that, exactly?" Sam asked him, and half expected his brother to hear him. Dean didn't move. Maybe Sam was asleep, finally.
The Devil smiled. "Why haven't I asked you to marry me?"
"Why did you kiss me, dumbass." Sam clarified, and he wasn't sober enough to keep the annoyance from his voice.
Lucifer shrugged and let his arms drop, more at ease. Languidly, he sat on the edge of the bed and turned back to face the hunter, his skin washed to corpse white in the light, the hollows under his eyes accentuated. Maybe he was tired, if the Devil was allowed to be tired. "I wanted to. You told me to do what I wanted." He said it like that had been on Sam's mind too, and not completely out of the blue. "If you didn't want me to, why'd you give me permission?"
Sam, if he had been sober, might have accused the Devil of splitting hairs and purposely misinterpreting what he'd intended, but he wasn't sober. "You wanted to kiss me."
"I don't get kissed often enough, in my opinion. It's maybe a once a year thing, assuming someone's opened the Cage and I put on some loved one's face and dream-walk myself into sexytown."
There was something about how he said it, something so lonely and honest, and it made Sam smile, even though he knew he shouldn't. Maybe it was because he'd kissed Lucifer in a dream once, when he'd been wearing Jess' skin, just under his chin. The hunter's eyes lingered on the place for a moment. Lucifer had to have been alone for a very, very long time, Sam realized, in the Cage, outcast, surrounded by fire and brimstone and pain and fear. Even if a demon had found him, it didn't change much.
Maybe that was why Sam pushed himself up and pulled the covers a little more tightly around his shoulders and sat next to the Devil. It was a dream, so Dean didn't notice. Lucifer did, however. Lucifer looked slightly up at him and blinked like he didn't understand, and something behind his eyes flashed with vulnerability. Even in the dark his eyes were blue. Even in a dream, he seemed to radiate cold.
"I have been drinking, so you cannot hold this against me later." Sam told him.
"Drinking? You're drunk?"
He nodded. "My brother's fault, actually. You should thank him. I get really nice when I'm drunk. Everything is so..." He took a deep breath and sighed it out like that explained how fine everything was. "Like you. You're Lucifer, you kissed me; these are problems. But I am drunk. You're still Lucifer, you still kissed me, but..."
"But?" Lucifer was very close to him, Sam realized. Close like Cas used to get close to Dean sometimes, close like maybe there was a secret the Devil needed to tell him in the quietest of whispers.
"But... but whatever." Sam dismissed all of those problems with a wave of his blanket covered hand. "Dean and I started the Apocalypse, I drank demon blood, tricked you into falling into the Pit with me, had sex with Ruby - not in that order - killed so many people thinking they were possessed... man, I am not going to be the pot this time." He slumped in on himself, a little disappointed in how easy it was to make Satan seem like a nice guy compared to himself. "What'd you do? Love God? Real evil, that one."
"I..." Lucifer stumbled over his words while his eyebrows raised like they wanted to climb into his hairline.
"I loved Him, too, you know. Kind of conceptually. Starting to feel like He's got a sick sense of humor at this point, though."
"Sam-"
"Let's not even get started on who disobeyed whose dad more often, either. I win." Sam admitted, and now that the confessions had started he had not means to stop them. "And then what we did to Cas when he told us he'd been working with Crowley? Dean sold his soul once. I tried a couple times, but no one wanted it. Point is, neither of us had room to say what we did to him, but we still said it, and one thing led to another and we all pushed each other too far. But not this time. I don't care if you are the Devil, I am not going to preach to you."
"Amen," Lucifer intoned reverently, and planted a hand firmly on Sam's knee, which was somehow not terrifying or awkward or even unwelcome. The Devil's smile was just a little crooked and still much too close and yet just the perfect distance for Sam to see his whole face, not just his eyes or his lips or his jaw. "Thank you, it's been a long time since-" Lucifer didn't get another word out, his mouth highjacked in a decidedly sloppy, if pleasant, kiss. For a moment he didn't respond to it, he just sat there, slightly too close for ordinary comfort, his hand still on Sam's knee, like an ice statue, only softer.
Sam's courage almost failed him. He almost backed off. Before he could withdraw, however, Lucifer surged into him, touched his face, his neck, his chest, deepened the contacted between them until it wasn't the innocent thing he had intended. It was a tangle of teeth and tongue and lips, hot and cool at once, like some distant, all consuming fire burned inside Lucifer and meant to spread into Sam.
There was want there, buried in everything the Devil did. Desire like Sam had never known.
It scared him a little.
Still, Lucifer let him pull away, let him sit there like he wasn't sure about what he'd just done, maybe because he wasn't. He didn't look at the man - Beast, angel - beside him. Instead, he pulled his feet up on the bed and looked down at the carpet, because it was safe and didn't stare back like it wanted something. That morning, he'd stabbed Lucifer there, soaked that same space with blood. That morning, he hadn't imagined this ever happening.
"Told you, I get really friendly." Sam mumbled, because it was all he could think to say at the moment.
"If that's friendly, what's... ready to go at it like a rabbit out of prison?" Lucifer's hand was still on his leg and he squeezed to remind Sam that it was there.
Sam chuckled and rubbed at his forehead with the blanket for a moment, a little too amused. Slowly but surely, all of his qualms about sitting there in a dream next to Satan were dissolving, kind of like the ones he'd had about kissing an imaginary Angel in a man's body, and the ones he'd had about Dean hearing him in his sleep. With a breathy sigh he sank back on the mattress, boneless, and closed his eyes to the whole situation. He wasn't thinking straight. He couldn't be. Yes, he was drunk, and Lucifer was short, and they'd kissed each other, he could handle that if he assumed something had snapped in his mind again, like Hell visions, but with confused feelings of understanding and sympathy.
"I don't get it," Sam didn't answer the Devil's question at all, and instead spoke to his eyelids like they weren't heavy enough to drag him into dreamless sleep at any moment.
"What?"
"Why I don't care that you're sitting on my bed. I keep thinking that you're misunderstood... and short. That's not normal. That's not drunk, either. Are you scrambling my brain on top of everything else?"
"Nope." The bed shifted when Lucifer moved, the mattress dipped. "That's all you, Sammy. I'm just lying here, wondering if you really believe what you said."
Sam opened one eye and looked at the Devil lying beside him and crinkled his eyebrows. While his eyes noted that Lucifer had a lazy beard starting on his chin, he tried to remember what he had said. "What'd I say?"
"About God."
"I dunno. It's not like... I don't believe it, I guess. It just feels that way. But that's what you get for trying to be good, right?"
Lucifer shook his head like that was the stupidest idea Sam had ever had and took his right hand. "We both know the road and we both know what it's paved with."
"Yeah."
For a time they didn't say anything, just remained sideways on the bed with Sam wrapped in covers and Lucifer loitering outside of them like he did not want to creep closer without being told he could. At some point Dean closed the laptop lid and the room went dark, just the tiniest stain of moonlight spilling from under the curtain and across the floor. It was an unspoken agreement that Sam was not going to dream anymore the moment he rolled over, his face turned toward the wall.
"Goodnight, Sam." Lucifer whispered to him, and pressed his fingers just a little painfully into Sam's palm before he let it go.
"Goodnight, Lucifer."
- - -
When sunlight came streaming in their window, Dean did not immediately hop out of bed and wake up his brother and get up to go hunt down what he thought might be the scion of a dying sea god, or crack a beer. Instead, he stayed in bed and looked at the ceiling for a moment, trying to digest the dream he'd just had, trying to make sense of it.
It wasn't going to happen, he realized after only a moment of trying to recall where his mind had come up with those ideas and how it had mashed them into a comprehensible dream. There was just no logical explanation for Cas to be in his brain as much as he had been recently.
On the opposite bed, Sam let out a long, happy sigh. Not fair. Not at all fair. Here Dean was, filled with guilt over what had to be his third inappropriate angel dream, and there was his little brother, sleeping like a baby. It was good though, because Sam had been bad at sleeping for a long time, longer than Dean had, actually, and it was about time he had more than two or three hours of solid rest before they started a day. Whatever was going on in his head wasn't important when he was asleep, not if he wasn't having nightmares, that was Dean's opinion, at least.
Still, when Sam rolled over and cuddled into his pillow like it might have been the breasts of a woman, Dean had to roll his eyes.
Dean disentangled himself from the sheets and got up slowly. Had he been dreaming about a back rub? He thought it might have started out as a back rub. Which was stupid. Angels wouldn't have the slightest idea where to even start.
Pushing that thought into the farthest part of his brain where he would not think about it, only drink to keep it from coming to the surface, Dean wandered into the bathroom and started the shower, leaving the door open while he made sure there was a towel and enough of his own shampoo that he wouldn't have to borrow Sam's. By the time he was just about to close himself into a self-made sauna, movement in main room distracted him.
Sam sat straight up in bed and put a hand to his mouth.
"You gonna puke?" Dean asked him, thinking of the copious amount of alcohol Sam had ingested the night before.
His brother looked at him, pale-faced and wide-eyed, before he shook his head and stammered in a low, surprised voice, "I kissed Lucifer."
Dean frowned. "What?"
Sam kept his hand over his mouth like his lips might fall off if he let them go. "What was I thinking?"
"Come again?"
"I..." Sam tried to explain to him without actually saying anything, which really only made him look crazy. He motioned with one hand while the other fluttered like a wounded bird from his mouth to his lap. "Really shouldn't have told you." He kept looking at his hand like maybe it was going to do something if he looked away from it - or like Dean was going to say something if he looked at him. Which was true.
Where was he even supposed to start? Dean didn't know. There wasn't anything he could come up with that would make a make-out dream with Lucifer sound alright - and if he made a comment on sexual orientation, it wouldn't be funny if it was true. There weren't may options.
And Sam looked more like he needed support than teasing at the moment.
"I dreamed I fucked Cas." He blurted. The words pulled Sam's eyes up like metal to a magnet. No, that hadn't been the best coarse of action, but now he was committed. He was chewing his lower lip, he had a towel over his bare shoulder, and he was committed. "Yeah. Guess that's in the open now. Dreams. Freaky crap happens." He turned back into the bathroom and, just slowly enough so that it wasn't like running away, pushed the door shut.
On the other side of the wood, Sam yelled a question that Dean pointedly pretended not to hear. Instead, he locked the door and slipped out of his pants and into the shower.
There he tried to forget that he'd told his brother the thing he'd been trying to to admit to himself for almost three weeks.
It was a very long shower.
When he came out, Sam was sitting on the edge of the bed, tying his shoes, his eyes only for the laces between his fingers, which made scrounging for clothing in nothing but a towel that much easier. They didn't speak, not while Dean gathered his things and took them in the bathroom to put them on, and not when he came out again. They remained in silence until Dean had his boots on and Sam had settled in front of his laptop like he expected to just dive right back into the case like nothing had happened.
"I was thinking about what Nichole said, about the, uh..." Dean couldn't remember the phrase, but he tried anyway. "Nymph thing. Anyway, I found some stuff on it last night, but nothing that seemed to fit the saltwater."
Sam clicked something and frowned. "Poseidon?"
"Yeah, well, that's the exception."
"We're hunting Poseidon?"
"We defeated Lucifer and stopped the Apocalypse, man, stop acting like this is the biggest fish we've ever seen." Because that's what it sounded like, but that Sam looked up at him with a face that said that had been the farthest thing from his mind. Dean didn't meet his eyes very long.
Sam sighed and leaned back in his chair like it was the most natural thing in the world despite what had happened to the previous chair. The wicker creaked threateningly. Sam didn't seem to care. "Alright, so we summon Poseidon? That... what if it isn't him? I mean, we're not running on much information."
"What do you wanna do? Sit here, waiting for another big-mouth to drop?"
"I don't know, maybe. This thing has only killed one Leviathan, we don't know if it's really on our side. Maybe we should give it a little time before we invite it in and ask it if it's here to help us."
There was logic there, but that didn't mean that Dean wanted to follow it. He'd done too much waiting around to wait much more. He wanted to kill something. Or help something else kill something. Either way. "You really think Bobby would send us to this little... college crap hole so we could bump into a god that wants to kill us?"
"Dad did it. It wasn't a god, but he did it. More than once." Sam pointed out, and lifted his eyebrows in the expression that usually meant he'd thought he'd won the debate, even if he hadn't. He stifled a yawn and pushed the laptop closed. "Just give it a day before we go pissing off some sea god that may or may not have anything to do with what we're dealing with. Maybe we can tap a professor for information." Sam gestured like that wasn't a really annoying pastime that he enjoyed - talking to old guys about things they liked to talk about.
Dean didn't like the idea. "You know what?"
"What?"
"Let's get breakfast. Then we can find out what the ritual would require, get the stuff for it, give it a little time for nothing to happen, and then summon the guy responsible for this." Dean offered as a compromise, not that it was a much of one, which Sam undoubtedly noticed. Dean was mildly surprised when Sam shrugged at the idea, and opened the laptop again, frowning.
"I'm not hungry."
"I am."
"Go alone, then."
"You gonna stay here and make-out with Satan's ghost?" Dean had just enough time to think that maybe he was being witty before regret hit him in the gut with the force of a punch.
"Maybe. Why? You gonna tell me how much of a bad idea that is?" Sam was trying to get him to take the bait, trying to get him to snap, and Dean really, really wanted to do it.
Dean scowled. "Yeah, I am. I don't even know where to start-"
"Hypocrite."
Dean turned and snatched up his jacket from the foot of the bed and pulled it over the clothes, ran his hands through his hair so it might not look so disorderly, and silently thanked God in specific that he'd already put his boots on. It would make walking out of the motel that much faster. Which meant he wouldn't have to explain himself. Not right now. Not sober and angry and frustrated and hurt like he didn't even have words for.
It wasn't like he called himself that word every morning when he looked in the mirror.
"Dean," Sam's voice was just a little too timid, just sorry enough that it stopped him from taking a step toward the door. He looked back to see his brother tentatively looking up at him, the laptop closed again, his eyes turned down in a puppy-dog expression. "I'm..." He floundered for a moment while he got himself a little more under control. "Can we just get it out in the open instead of pretending like nothing happened?"
That sounded decidedly close to a chick-flick moment, but it was time to make an exception. There were secrets that needed to be kept and secrets that just made everything harder the longer they stayed hidden, and maybe this was the latter. A little. As long as they did not go into gory details.
"You first," Dean said, and at once Sam held out his fist in the silent request for a game or rock, paper, scissors.
There was a moment of settling, while the two of them prepared for their duel. Dean decided even before the count off what he'd be throwing, and then switched at the last possible moment, which was fairly out of the ordinary for him. The moment his hand flattened into the shape of a piece of paper, he had to wonder where that idea had come from, before he didn't really care. Sam had thrown rock. As always. Elation might have been the emotion Dean felt for just the briefest of moments.
"Two out of three!" Sam prepared to go again.
"No, no, no, none of that crap, you talk. Right now."
Sam took a slow, deep breath and bit his lip, pulled his mouth down in an expression that conveyed his unwillingness quite clearly. He waved at the nearest edge of the bed in an invitation to sit on the tasteless golden comforter. When Dean was sitting at the place that Sam had indicated, Sam folded his hands together and then pulled them apart and crossed his arms across the red plaid shirt he was wearing, defensive in the worst way. Everything about him was awkward and shy for a moment.
"I know that I've been hallucinating, and I know that I'm not... normal. And I know that Lucifer is the Devil, and I know that I have a bad record for this sort of thing." Sam started.
"Bad isn't the word I would use, Sammy."
"Shut up," Sam told him, and something about the words seemed easier than the ones that came before. Maybe because he knew that Dean wouldn't abandon him. Not really. Not forever. They were brothers; there wasn't a thing Sam could say that Dean wouldn't be able to handle. "A little while ago, the hallucinations changed. Lucifer stopped being an ass and started... I don't know, but it's like he's a different guy. He told me things, researched things, offered to help. And since then, I haven't seen Hell or anything. Just him, some times."
Dean nodded. "And you kissed him."
Sam did not try to backpeddle out of that addition in the slightest. "I was drunk and he was lonely, so yeah, I kissed Lucifer in a dream."
That didn't sound nearly as awful as Dean had imagined it. He was a little proud of himself with how well he was taking it, actually, not that much could surprise him. Especially with Sam.
"So... you and Cas?"
"Whoa, whoa, we're talking about you and Lucifer, still. Until you get hungry." He tried to look like he was pissed, like he was ready to throw a punch because his little brother had had a homosexual experience with the least attractive angel, ever. He didn't think it worked.
"Dean," Sam's tone was almost like a mom tone, but more trusting, less judgmental. He had relaxed since the conversation had started and he only relaxed more, now, because for him, the hard part was mostly over, he had confessed and Dean hadn't shot him or gone off on the rant he'd been writing subconsciously since that morning. That seemed to be enough to put Sam in a perfectly happy mood. He leaned on his hand like this was the most natural, interesting conversation they'd ever had.
There wasn't any escaping this. Sam would be worse than a Hellhound if Dean tried, he was relatively sure.
Didn't mean he couldn't try.
"It's just kissing though, right? No... inappropriate touching?"
"Dean."
"Because if the Devil's ghost is inappropriately touching my brother, I will find out how to kill hallucinations."
"Dean." Sam was losing his patience.
"It isn't anything, really. Just... a reoccurring dream." Dean wouldn't let himself call it a nightmare, though he'd thought it was one at first. "I'm in the Impala, alone, just... waiting for someone or something, and everything is so real. And then Cas shows up, and he's him, but he's different, like he doesn't know me, like I'm not the person he remembers. And we sorta..." Usually, Sam would stop him about then, because too much information could be scarring in more ways than one. Dean tried not to think about the details - about Cas not having a coat, about the rumbled state of his hair, about the slide of skin under his fingers. Dean cleared his throat. "It isn't normal. But I miss him and it makes sense to him, so it happens."
Sam's mouth quirked into a devilish grin. "So, it's Dean on Cas in the Impala."
"Yeah," Dean ground the word out, not liking where this was going.
"And you miss him?"
"Man, would you stop making it sound like that?"
Sam pursed his lips and pretended to think about it before he shook his head. "Like it's adorable?"
Dean reached back and threw the nearest pillow at his brother, and smiled when Sam laughed at the impact on his arms. When the pillow flopped to the carpet, Dean sighed, a weight off his chest. "I guess it would be. He's dead, though."
That rained on Sam's parade a little, but his smile still managed to survive the change in the weather. Maybe it was because he understood a little, what with Lucifer being nothing like how his mind seemed to be pretending recently and a pile of other problems. Still, when Sam shrugged the whole thing off for later discussion, it felt almost too easy to move on like everything was exactly as it had always been.
"So, breakfast?" Sam suggested, apparently hungry now.
Dean stood up from the bed and rolled his shoulders - the left one felt fine today, which seemed fast considering it'd bothered him the previous morning. "Finally, I'm starving."
- - -
-- -- --
There had never been a more comfortable bed than the one in the motel room, not to Sam at least, not that night. He sank down on it and shucked off his shoes and his jeans and pulled off his shirt and curled up under the blankets, because the room was very cold, just as it had been outside. Sleep, however, felt distant. So he lay there on the most comfortable mattress ever, just his eyes poking from the covers, and watched the room and the shadows cast by the eerie bluish light of Dean's laptop screen. He didn't know what he was looking for, but the mound of broken chair in the corner wasn't it, and the intense crease of his brother's eyebrows wasn't it, either. Something was missing.
He tried to think about the job, about the little bits of information he'd gleaned from the bar. He couldn't keep his thoughts in order.
And then there was Lucifer. The Devil lurked in the back of his mind, a specter haunting his thoughts. Lucifer had helped him, teased him, and kissed him. What had that been about? Any of that? Sam didn't know. Sam did know that Lucifer wasn't acting like he had been when he'd first showed up as a hallucination, however, and that kind of bothered him. It all came back to something that had been said somewhat casually that hadn't meant much to him at the time.
Lucifer would keep Sam's brain from remembering Hell, from dreaming up visions of the Devil himself. What did that mean?
Why did Sam care?
He buried his face in his pillow. He had made too many stupid decisions to be thinking about trusting the Devil, but he was. After Meg and Azazel and Ruby and being a meat-suit on two separate occasions, he knew it should have been a lesson learned, not something he needed to be reminded of, not something he had to struggle with and fret over. He remembered Hell. He remembered twisting his hand and snapping Bobby's neck, snapping his fingers and exploding Castiel. Those weren't moments that he could forget, even if he hadn't been in the driver's seat for them.
The pillow smelled like blood and soap. He remembered that he'd cut his hand that morning and hadn't had the chance to go down to the front desk for new sheets and a pillow case yet.
If all of those reasons weren't enough, there was still the fact that this was Satan he was thinking about. Likely fake Satan. Not even real Satan.
The kiss had felt pretty real.
If he'd been alone, Sam would have sat up cursing and grumbling and gone and attempted to lose himself in research. But he couldn't do that, now. So instead, he tucked the covers a little more tightly around himself and tried to push Lucifer into a box in his mind and lock him away.
Sleep crept up on him slowly, pulled him down into a spiral that made him think that maybe, if he could let go of the moment, he'd be dreaming, but he hadn't yet. Just dozing. The room around him still looked and felt the same, and he could still hear Dean clicking away at the keyboard.
"It was just a kiss, Sam, not like I asked you to marry me." The voice was just a whisper, just loud enough that he could hear it, and he rolled away from his brother to find Lucifer leaning on the dresser, his arms crossed over his plaid shirt like he was cold.
"And why is that, exactly?" Sam asked him, and half expected his brother to hear him. Dean didn't move. Maybe Sam was asleep, finally.
The Devil smiled. "Why haven't I asked you to marry me?"
"Why did you kiss me, dumbass." Sam clarified, and he wasn't sober enough to keep the annoyance from his voice.
Lucifer shrugged and let his arms drop, more at ease. Languidly, he sat on the edge of the bed and turned back to face the hunter, his skin washed to corpse white in the light, the hollows under his eyes accentuated. Maybe he was tired, if the Devil was allowed to be tired. "I wanted to. You told me to do what I wanted." He said it like that had been on Sam's mind too, and not completely out of the blue. "If you didn't want me to, why'd you give me permission?"
Sam, if he had been sober, might have accused the Devil of splitting hairs and purposely misinterpreting what he'd intended, but he wasn't sober. "You wanted to kiss me."
"I don't get kissed often enough, in my opinion. It's maybe a once a year thing, assuming someone's opened the Cage and I put on some loved one's face and dream-walk myself into sexytown."
There was something about how he said it, something so lonely and honest, and it made Sam smile, even though he knew he shouldn't. Maybe it was because he'd kissed Lucifer in a dream once, when he'd been wearing Jess' skin, just under his chin. The hunter's eyes lingered on the place for a moment. Lucifer had to have been alone for a very, very long time, Sam realized, in the Cage, outcast, surrounded by fire and brimstone and pain and fear. Even if a demon had found him, it didn't change much.
Maybe that was why Sam pushed himself up and pulled the covers a little more tightly around his shoulders and sat next to the Devil. It was a dream, so Dean didn't notice. Lucifer did, however. Lucifer looked slightly up at him and blinked like he didn't understand, and something behind his eyes flashed with vulnerability. Even in the dark his eyes were blue. Even in a dream, he seemed to radiate cold.
"I have been drinking, so you cannot hold this against me later." Sam told him.
"Drinking? You're drunk?"
He nodded. "My brother's fault, actually. You should thank him. I get really nice when I'm drunk. Everything is so..." He took a deep breath and sighed it out like that explained how fine everything was. "Like you. You're Lucifer, you kissed me; these are problems. But I am drunk. You're still Lucifer, you still kissed me, but..."
"But?" Lucifer was very close to him, Sam realized. Close like Cas used to get close to Dean sometimes, close like maybe there was a secret the Devil needed to tell him in the quietest of whispers.
"But... but whatever." Sam dismissed all of those problems with a wave of his blanket covered hand. "Dean and I started the Apocalypse, I drank demon blood, tricked you into falling into the Pit with me, had sex with Ruby - not in that order - killed so many people thinking they were possessed... man, I am not going to be the pot this time." He slumped in on himself, a little disappointed in how easy it was to make Satan seem like a nice guy compared to himself. "What'd you do? Love God? Real evil, that one."
"I..." Lucifer stumbled over his words while his eyebrows raised like they wanted to climb into his hairline.
"I loved Him, too, you know. Kind of conceptually. Starting to feel like He's got a sick sense of humor at this point, though."
"Sam-"
"Let's not even get started on who disobeyed whose dad more often, either. I win." Sam admitted, and now that the confessions had started he had not means to stop them. "And then what we did to Cas when he told us he'd been working with Crowley? Dean sold his soul once. I tried a couple times, but no one wanted it. Point is, neither of us had room to say what we did to him, but we still said it, and one thing led to another and we all pushed each other too far. But not this time. I don't care if you are the Devil, I am not going to preach to you."
"Amen," Lucifer intoned reverently, and planted a hand firmly on Sam's knee, which was somehow not terrifying or awkward or even unwelcome. The Devil's smile was just a little crooked and still much too close and yet just the perfect distance for Sam to see his whole face, not just his eyes or his lips or his jaw. "Thank you, it's been a long time since-" Lucifer didn't get another word out, his mouth highjacked in a decidedly sloppy, if pleasant, kiss. For a moment he didn't respond to it, he just sat there, slightly too close for ordinary comfort, his hand still on Sam's knee, like an ice statue, only softer.
Sam's courage almost failed him. He almost backed off. Before he could withdraw, however, Lucifer surged into him, touched his face, his neck, his chest, deepened the contacted between them until it wasn't the innocent thing he had intended. It was a tangle of teeth and tongue and lips, hot and cool at once, like some distant, all consuming fire burned inside Lucifer and meant to spread into Sam.
There was want there, buried in everything the Devil did. Desire like Sam had never known.
It scared him a little.
Still, Lucifer let him pull away, let him sit there like he wasn't sure about what he'd just done, maybe because he wasn't. He didn't look at the man - Beast, angel - beside him. Instead, he pulled his feet up on the bed and looked down at the carpet, because it was safe and didn't stare back like it wanted something. That morning, he'd stabbed Lucifer there, soaked that same space with blood. That morning, he hadn't imagined this ever happening.
"Told you, I get really friendly." Sam mumbled, because it was all he could think to say at the moment.
"If that's friendly, what's... ready to go at it like a rabbit out of prison?" Lucifer's hand was still on his leg and he squeezed to remind Sam that it was there.
Sam chuckled and rubbed at his forehead with the blanket for a moment, a little too amused. Slowly but surely, all of his qualms about sitting there in a dream next to Satan were dissolving, kind of like the ones he'd had about kissing an imaginary Angel in a man's body, and the ones he'd had about Dean hearing him in his sleep. With a breathy sigh he sank back on the mattress, boneless, and closed his eyes to the whole situation. He wasn't thinking straight. He couldn't be. Yes, he was drunk, and Lucifer was short, and they'd kissed each other, he could handle that if he assumed something had snapped in his mind again, like Hell visions, but with confused feelings of understanding and sympathy.
"I don't get it," Sam didn't answer the Devil's question at all, and instead spoke to his eyelids like they weren't heavy enough to drag him into dreamless sleep at any moment.
"What?"
"Why I don't care that you're sitting on my bed. I keep thinking that you're misunderstood... and short. That's not normal. That's not drunk, either. Are you scrambling my brain on top of everything else?"
"Nope." The bed shifted when Lucifer moved, the mattress dipped. "That's all you, Sammy. I'm just lying here, wondering if you really believe what you said."
Sam opened one eye and looked at the Devil lying beside him and crinkled his eyebrows. While his eyes noted that Lucifer had a lazy beard starting on his chin, he tried to remember what he had said. "What'd I say?"
"About God."
"I dunno. It's not like... I don't believe it, I guess. It just feels that way. But that's what you get for trying to be good, right?"
Lucifer shook his head like that was the stupidest idea Sam had ever had and took his right hand. "We both know the road and we both know what it's paved with."
"Yeah."
For a time they didn't say anything, just remained sideways on the bed with Sam wrapped in covers and Lucifer loitering outside of them like he did not want to creep closer without being told he could. At some point Dean closed the laptop lid and the room went dark, just the tiniest stain of moonlight spilling from under the curtain and across the floor. It was an unspoken agreement that Sam was not going to dream anymore the moment he rolled over, his face turned toward the wall.
"Goodnight, Sam." Lucifer whispered to him, and pressed his fingers just a little painfully into Sam's palm before he let it go.
"Goodnight, Lucifer."
- - -
When sunlight came streaming in their window, Dean did not immediately hop out of bed and wake up his brother and get up to go hunt down what he thought might be the scion of a dying sea god, or crack a beer. Instead, he stayed in bed and looked at the ceiling for a moment, trying to digest the dream he'd just had, trying to make sense of it.
It wasn't going to happen, he realized after only a moment of trying to recall where his mind had come up with those ideas and how it had mashed them into a comprehensible dream. There was just no logical explanation for Cas to be in his brain as much as he had been recently.
On the opposite bed, Sam let out a long, happy sigh. Not fair. Not at all fair. Here Dean was, filled with guilt over what had to be his third inappropriate angel dream, and there was his little brother, sleeping like a baby. It was good though, because Sam had been bad at sleeping for a long time, longer than Dean had, actually, and it was about time he had more than two or three hours of solid rest before they started a day. Whatever was going on in his head wasn't important when he was asleep, not if he wasn't having nightmares, that was Dean's opinion, at least.
Still, when Sam rolled over and cuddled into his pillow like it might have been the breasts of a woman, Dean had to roll his eyes.
Dean disentangled himself from the sheets and got up slowly. Had he been dreaming about a back rub? He thought it might have started out as a back rub. Which was stupid. Angels wouldn't have the slightest idea where to even start.
Pushing that thought into the farthest part of his brain where he would not think about it, only drink to keep it from coming to the surface, Dean wandered into the bathroom and started the shower, leaving the door open while he made sure there was a towel and enough of his own shampoo that he wouldn't have to borrow Sam's. By the time he was just about to close himself into a self-made sauna, movement in main room distracted him.
Sam sat straight up in bed and put a hand to his mouth.
"You gonna puke?" Dean asked him, thinking of the copious amount of alcohol Sam had ingested the night before.
His brother looked at him, pale-faced and wide-eyed, before he shook his head and stammered in a low, surprised voice, "I kissed Lucifer."
Dean frowned. "What?"
Sam kept his hand over his mouth like his lips might fall off if he let them go. "What was I thinking?"
"Come again?"
"I..." Sam tried to explain to him without actually saying anything, which really only made him look crazy. He motioned with one hand while the other fluttered like a wounded bird from his mouth to his lap. "Really shouldn't have told you." He kept looking at his hand like maybe it was going to do something if he looked away from it - or like Dean was going to say something if he looked at him. Which was true.
Where was he even supposed to start? Dean didn't know. There wasn't anything he could come up with that would make a make-out dream with Lucifer sound alright - and if he made a comment on sexual orientation, it wouldn't be funny if it was true. There weren't may options.
And Sam looked more like he needed support than teasing at the moment.
"I dreamed I fucked Cas." He blurted. The words pulled Sam's eyes up like metal to a magnet. No, that hadn't been the best coarse of action, but now he was committed. He was chewing his lower lip, he had a towel over his bare shoulder, and he was committed. "Yeah. Guess that's in the open now. Dreams. Freaky crap happens." He turned back into the bathroom and, just slowly enough so that it wasn't like running away, pushed the door shut.
On the other side of the wood, Sam yelled a question that Dean pointedly pretended not to hear. Instead, he locked the door and slipped out of his pants and into the shower.
There he tried to forget that he'd told his brother the thing he'd been trying to to admit to himself for almost three weeks.
It was a very long shower.
When he came out, Sam was sitting on the edge of the bed, tying his shoes, his eyes only for the laces between his fingers, which made scrounging for clothing in nothing but a towel that much easier. They didn't speak, not while Dean gathered his things and took them in the bathroom to put them on, and not when he came out again. They remained in silence until Dean had his boots on and Sam had settled in front of his laptop like he expected to just dive right back into the case like nothing had happened.
"I was thinking about what Nichole said, about the, uh..." Dean couldn't remember the phrase, but he tried anyway. "Nymph thing. Anyway, I found some stuff on it last night, but nothing that seemed to fit the saltwater."
Sam clicked something and frowned. "Poseidon?"
"Yeah, well, that's the exception."
"We're hunting Poseidon?"
"We defeated Lucifer and stopped the Apocalypse, man, stop acting like this is the biggest fish we've ever seen." Because that's what it sounded like, but that Sam looked up at him with a face that said that had been the farthest thing from his mind. Dean didn't meet his eyes very long.
Sam sighed and leaned back in his chair like it was the most natural thing in the world despite what had happened to the previous chair. The wicker creaked threateningly. Sam didn't seem to care. "Alright, so we summon Poseidon? That... what if it isn't him? I mean, we're not running on much information."
"What do you wanna do? Sit here, waiting for another big-mouth to drop?"
"I don't know, maybe. This thing has only killed one Leviathan, we don't know if it's really on our side. Maybe we should give it a little time before we invite it in and ask it if it's here to help us."
There was logic there, but that didn't mean that Dean wanted to follow it. He'd done too much waiting around to wait much more. He wanted to kill something. Or help something else kill something. Either way. "You really think Bobby would send us to this little... college crap hole so we could bump into a god that wants to kill us?"
"Dad did it. It wasn't a god, but he did it. More than once." Sam pointed out, and lifted his eyebrows in the expression that usually meant he'd thought he'd won the debate, even if he hadn't. He stifled a yawn and pushed the laptop closed. "Just give it a day before we go pissing off some sea god that may or may not have anything to do with what we're dealing with. Maybe we can tap a professor for information." Sam gestured like that wasn't a really annoying pastime that he enjoyed - talking to old guys about things they liked to talk about.
Dean didn't like the idea. "You know what?"
"What?"
"Let's get breakfast. Then we can find out what the ritual would require, get the stuff for it, give it a little time for nothing to happen, and then summon the guy responsible for this." Dean offered as a compromise, not that it was a much of one, which Sam undoubtedly noticed. Dean was mildly surprised when Sam shrugged at the idea, and opened the laptop again, frowning.
"I'm not hungry."
"I am."
"Go alone, then."
"You gonna stay here and make-out with Satan's ghost?" Dean had just enough time to think that maybe he was being witty before regret hit him in the gut with the force of a punch.
"Maybe. Why? You gonna tell me how much of a bad idea that is?" Sam was trying to get him to take the bait, trying to get him to snap, and Dean really, really wanted to do it.
Dean scowled. "Yeah, I am. I don't even know where to start-"
"Hypocrite."
Dean turned and snatched up his jacket from the foot of the bed and pulled it over the clothes, ran his hands through his hair so it might not look so disorderly, and silently thanked God in specific that he'd already put his boots on. It would make walking out of the motel that much faster. Which meant he wouldn't have to explain himself. Not right now. Not sober and angry and frustrated and hurt like he didn't even have words for.
It wasn't like he called himself that word every morning when he looked in the mirror.
"Dean," Sam's voice was just a little too timid, just sorry enough that it stopped him from taking a step toward the door. He looked back to see his brother tentatively looking up at him, the laptop closed again, his eyes turned down in a puppy-dog expression. "I'm..." He floundered for a moment while he got himself a little more under control. "Can we just get it out in the open instead of pretending like nothing happened?"
That sounded decidedly close to a chick-flick moment, but it was time to make an exception. There were secrets that needed to be kept and secrets that just made everything harder the longer they stayed hidden, and maybe this was the latter. A little. As long as they did not go into gory details.
"You first," Dean said, and at once Sam held out his fist in the silent request for a game or rock, paper, scissors.
There was a moment of settling, while the two of them prepared for their duel. Dean decided even before the count off what he'd be throwing, and then switched at the last possible moment, which was fairly out of the ordinary for him. The moment his hand flattened into the shape of a piece of paper, he had to wonder where that idea had come from, before he didn't really care. Sam had thrown rock. As always. Elation might have been the emotion Dean felt for just the briefest of moments.
"Two out of three!" Sam prepared to go again.
"No, no, no, none of that crap, you talk. Right now."
Sam took a slow, deep breath and bit his lip, pulled his mouth down in an expression that conveyed his unwillingness quite clearly. He waved at the nearest edge of the bed in an invitation to sit on the tasteless golden comforter. When Dean was sitting at the place that Sam had indicated, Sam folded his hands together and then pulled them apart and crossed his arms across the red plaid shirt he was wearing, defensive in the worst way. Everything about him was awkward and shy for a moment.
"I know that I've been hallucinating, and I know that I'm not... normal. And I know that Lucifer is the Devil, and I know that I have a bad record for this sort of thing." Sam started.
"Bad isn't the word I would use, Sammy."
"Shut up," Sam told him, and something about the words seemed easier than the ones that came before. Maybe because he knew that Dean wouldn't abandon him. Not really. Not forever. They were brothers; there wasn't a thing Sam could say that Dean wouldn't be able to handle. "A little while ago, the hallucinations changed. Lucifer stopped being an ass and started... I don't know, but it's like he's a different guy. He told me things, researched things, offered to help. And since then, I haven't seen Hell or anything. Just him, some times."
Dean nodded. "And you kissed him."
Sam did not try to backpeddle out of that addition in the slightest. "I was drunk and he was lonely, so yeah, I kissed Lucifer in a dream."
That didn't sound nearly as awful as Dean had imagined it. He was a little proud of himself with how well he was taking it, actually, not that much could surprise him. Especially with Sam.
"So... you and Cas?"
"Whoa, whoa, we're talking about you and Lucifer, still. Until you get hungry." He tried to look like he was pissed, like he was ready to throw a punch because his little brother had had a homosexual experience with the least attractive angel, ever. He didn't think it worked.
"Dean," Sam's tone was almost like a mom tone, but more trusting, less judgmental. He had relaxed since the conversation had started and he only relaxed more, now, because for him, the hard part was mostly over, he had confessed and Dean hadn't shot him or gone off on the rant he'd been writing subconsciously since that morning. That seemed to be enough to put Sam in a perfectly happy mood. He leaned on his hand like this was the most natural, interesting conversation they'd ever had.
There wasn't any escaping this. Sam would be worse than a Hellhound if Dean tried, he was relatively sure.
Didn't mean he couldn't try.
"It's just kissing though, right? No... inappropriate touching?"
"Dean."
"Because if the Devil's ghost is inappropriately touching my brother, I will find out how to kill hallucinations."
"Dean." Sam was losing his patience.
"It isn't anything, really. Just... a reoccurring dream." Dean wouldn't let himself call it a nightmare, though he'd thought it was one at first. "I'm in the Impala, alone, just... waiting for someone or something, and everything is so real. And then Cas shows up, and he's him, but he's different, like he doesn't know me, like I'm not the person he remembers. And we sorta..." Usually, Sam would stop him about then, because too much information could be scarring in more ways than one. Dean tried not to think about the details - about Cas not having a coat, about the rumbled state of his hair, about the slide of skin under his fingers. Dean cleared his throat. "It isn't normal. But I miss him and it makes sense to him, so it happens."
Sam's mouth quirked into a devilish grin. "So, it's Dean on Cas in the Impala."
"Yeah," Dean ground the word out, not liking where this was going.
"And you miss him?"
"Man, would you stop making it sound like that?"
Sam pursed his lips and pretended to think about it before he shook his head. "Like it's adorable?"
Dean reached back and threw the nearest pillow at his brother, and smiled when Sam laughed at the impact on his arms. When the pillow flopped to the carpet, Dean sighed, a weight off his chest. "I guess it would be. He's dead, though."
That rained on Sam's parade a little, but his smile still managed to survive the change in the weather. Maybe it was because he understood a little, what with Lucifer being nothing like how his mind seemed to be pretending recently and a pile of other problems. Still, when Sam shrugged the whole thing off for later discussion, it felt almost too easy to move on like everything was exactly as it had always been.
"So, breakfast?" Sam suggested, apparently hungry now.
Dean stood up from the bed and rolled his shoulders - the left one felt fine today, which seemed fast considering it'd bothered him the previous morning. "Finally, I'm starving."
- - -