Fic: For His Hands Are So Cold
Title: For His Hands Are So Cold
Author: cordelia_gray
Rating/Pairings: Gen, R for language and a little blood.
Words: 2216
Warnings: Language, blood, dark themes.
Notes: Very belated spn-j2-xmas gift for the delightful monicawoe.
Sorry this is so late, bb! I hope you like it, I tried to include as many of your likes as I could :) It's inspired by your first prompt, about how Lucifer seeps back in, because Sam said yes, and there are no take-backs.
Thanks to de_nugis for a lighting-quick beta - you make everything you touch better! All remaining errors are all mine. Thanks also to bertee and the other mods for running this lovely challenge, and being so patient and wise.
For His Hands Are So Cold
I'm fixing a hole where the rain gets in, and stops my mind from wandering...
“Shut the fuck up!” Sam yells. He'd throw something, a pillow, anything, if he had the energy. Not that it would do any good. Not that he's even supposed to be talking to him. He's not real. He's not.
“Oh, Sammy, Sammy, so rude,” the Devil tsks at him from his perch atop the dresser in the corner of the room. He's wearing scrubs today, for some reason, just like Sam's. White. “Didn't your mama teach you better manners?”
Sam's back to not answering. He can feel his mouth compressed into a thin line with the effort not to respond, not to rise to the bait.
“No, I guess she didn't, did she?” The Devil puts his hand to mouth, in a parody of regret. “Oops! My bad.”
Sam closes his eyes, leans back against the wall. He can resist this, for a little bit longer. He's being tormented by a figment of his own fucked-up brain, that's all it is. Not real. He can't die until Dean gets back. He can hold out a little longer.
The Devil is blessedly silent for a moment, causing an utterly irrational hope to leap into Sam's throat. He opens his eyes to see that the orderlies are arriving with the dinner trays. The Devil is watching the process curiously, letting the noise of the trolley, the banging doors, the orderlies' chatter, the other inmates complaints do his work for him.
Sam manages a tired smile when a young man with dark hair and kind eyes hands him a tray. “Try to eat,” he says. “Real food's better than all this, you know.” He gestures at the tubes in Sam's arm.
“I'll try,” Sam says. “Thank you.”
The orderlies leave Sam's tray of food and meds on the dresser by the door.
Lucifer peers at it intently for a moment, then passes his hand across the top. Sam can see the food wilting and rotting with the motion, the vegetables going moldy, the meat turning black. The scent of food changes to a sickly odor of decay, filling the room.
Sam wants to be sick. He wants to cry. He is so hungry. He can't even remember the last time he ate. His throat is still raw from the feeding tube they'd had him on when he first got here. He needs to eat.
“Ah-ah-ah,” the Devil says, wagging a finger at Sam. “This is not for you. I need you hungry, when the time comes.”
“What do you mean, when the time comes? What are you talking about?”
But the Devil is ignoring him now (given the cold shoulder by a figment of his own imagination). He's back to the Beatles song, humming a little, playing an imaginary harpsichord, filling a corner of the room with a full-on orchestra in Sgt. Pepper regalia.
I'm painting my room in the colorful way, and when my mind is wandering, there I will go...
“STOP IT!” Sam finds himself standing in the center of the room, yelling over the music. “You don't get to do this, I don't care about Stairway to Heaven, ok? It's a shitty song, I don't care what Dean says, it's just high school slow-dance crap. But you don't get this! You don't get Sgt. Pepper's! It's not fair!”
The Devil laughs, delighted. “That's the spirit!”
The orderly has returned, drawn by the noise. Sam is acutely aware that he is standing in his bare feet in the middle of an empty room, yelling at someone who isn't there.
( Yesterday, upon the stair, I met a man who wasn't there. He wasn't there again today, oh how I wish he'd go away.)
“Sorry, sorry,” Sam is babbling, over the sound of Lucifer murmuring behind him. “I thought there was someone here, I'm sorry.”
“Did you take your meds?” The orderly is asking him something, he needs to answer, he needs to get this right. But the words don't come, drowned in the cacaphony of crashing cymbals and strings swelling from some unseen corner of the room. There's a struggle, something sharp, it pricks like a thorn, leading Sam down into darkness.
I'm filling the cracks that ran through the door
And kept my mind from wandering
Where it will go
And it really doesn't matter if I'm wrong I'm right
Where I belong I'm right
Where I belong...
When he comes up again, time has passed. He hasn't been asleep, not really, just not quite there, lost the plot for a while. It's not a rest, no rest for the wicked, but at least he doesn't remember it, which is something.
“The Beatles, huh?” The Devil is watching him, not in scrubs anymore, jeans and boots and flannel. Like Dean, Dean dresses like that. “Dean isn't coming back, Sammy. You know that, right? He can't save you - this is just between you and me.” The Devil grins, leans forward. “It's the way it was always meant to be, Sam. You and me against the world. It's the way it's always going to be.”
“No,” Sam says, quiet but firm. “No. We beat you. You're down in the hole, and I'm up here. We won.”
Lucifer laughs.
“You said 'yes', Sam. You let me in, there's no going back on your word. I will be with you, always. And I always win.”
Sam crosses his arms over his chest. They've been up and down all sides of this argument for who knows how long - days, weeks, centuries, forever and a day. He's not going to engage, he knows how it goes.
“You can't shut me out, Sam. I'm in your head, remember?”
Sam shrugs. “This isn't my first rodeo, you know. I've had a lot of practice with hallucinations. I know one when I see one.”
The Devil clasps his heart dramatically. “You wound me, Sammy. Denying my existence like that - it's enough to hurt my pride.”
Sam shrugs again.
A monkey with a miniature cymbal, clashing wildly, out of tune and out of rhythm, rolls across the floor. He's wearing a Sgt. Pepper jacket.
“Let's get back to a more interesting conversation, shall we?” Lucifer has settled on the bed right next to Sam. If he turns his head, he'll be right there on the pillow.
Sam doesn't turn his head, just recrosses his arms and stares at the crack in the plaster on the opposite wall. He can almost see the tip of Lucifer's boots resting casually on the white bedspread, out of his peripheral vision. He ignores them.
“See, it's you reaction to the Beatles that really interests me,” the Devil says, in a casual conversational tone. “You seem to feel like there are things I shouldn't touch, things I don't get to have. Your little girlfriend - Jessica, right? Or some kinds of pop music. I don't know why you try to keep me out, Sam. You're mine, remember? You said 'yes'. You let me in. You don't get to keep certain things for yourself, you know.”
He's off again, waltzing around the room, swelling strings surrounding him. “All of me, why not take aaaallll of me,” voice smoky, torch singer crooning with just a hint of violin somewhere behind him.
Sam's reciting Latin exorcisms in his head, trying to block it out, to remove himself from the room, just let the madness wash over him in waves, to find a still point in the center, a rock to cling to in the shifting seas of Lucifer's mercuriality.
But the song's shifted again, now it's “Hey Jude,” and Sam can't help but flinch. Just a tiny one, but the Devil catches it, all up in his face again.
“Just because Mother Mary liked them, Sammy, doesn't mean they're something special. Just another rock band, climbing over everyone for fame and fortune, drugs and groupies. They're no better than they should be.” He cocks his head. “Hell, they're practically made for corruption by demons. 'Helter Skelter' ring any bells?”
“I'm not Charlie Manson,” Sam says, flatly. “He was just some guy who had a psychotic break, and was charismatic enough to take a few people with him.”
The Devil laughs. “So innocent, Sam. You think Manson was just an ordinary psycho? No, he was one of mine. One of Azazel's special children. He didn't work out, though. Not strong enough. Not like you, Sam.”
Lucifer leans in close, whispering,“You're Charlie Manson if I want you to be, Sammy.” His smile is cold as ice, it feels like all the warmth has been leached out of the room. He runs his hand lightly through the days-old stubble on Sam's cheeks. “Look, you're even growing the beard for it. And the Jesus hair. But Manson, he a was a little toad. You're so much better than he was. Tall, handsome. Great abs. A vessel fit for a king, really.”
Lucifer steps back. “You see, Sam, you think you're here and I'm down there, but that's the thing - we're connected, you and I. 'When you get to the bottom, you go back to the top of the slide, you stop and you turn and you go for a ride, till you get to the bottom and I see you agaiiinnn!”
The music swells again, loud and fast and urgent. Lucifer rocking out on air guitar, some grotesque parody of karaoke night.
“You can't run, Sam. You can't hide. You bring me with you, wherever you go. We're made for each other, remember? It's always going to be the way it was. There's only one way this story goes: I win, so - I win.”
“NO!” Sam screams, hands over his ears. He tries to stand, to face him head-on, to refute this stupid argument, but his traitorous legs won't hold him up, and he crashes to the floor.
There's a loud, discordant crash of cymbals. The Devil smiles. “They're here,” he says, all creepy song-song. “Showtime, Sammy!” He strikes a jazz-hands pose, and vanishes.
Sam can hear some confusion in the hall outside his room, someone approaching. It's the orderlies again, the one who gave him dinner, with the dark hair and the kind eyes pushing a gurney with alarming-looking bondage gear. His eyes are no longer kind: they're inky-black.
Sam, still on the floor, scrambles back against the bed, searching for a weapon, anything, a way to hold them at bay. The door to his room crashes open, and - God, fuck, he can smell them. The scent of blood pumping through their veins, sulfur-laden and rich with power. Sam is ravenous, the starvation of the last weeks catching up with him all at once like a steam-train.
The demons reach for him, grabbing his hands and feet. “This is gonna be fun, Winchester,” the lead one growls. “We're going to have ourselves a party!”
The Devil watches from the wall, and smiles. “I needed you hungry.”
Sam can hear it now, the blood sluicing through the thick veins in the wrist of the demon holding him. They're bundling him on to the gurney, Sam trying to fight back but betrayed by the weakness of his body, limbs weak from exhaustion and malnourishment. His body has consumed itself in a desperate attempt to stay alive.
Sam turns his head and sinks his teeth into the demon's wrist.
Blood flows freely, like manna from heaven, and Sam drinks it greedily. He can feel the raw power seeping into him, filling all the empty spaces in his body, strength returning, blooming like a desert in the rain.
He meets Lucifer's eyes, bright with approval. Something curious happens then, a sense of dislocation, a twist in the fabric of reality. A part of Sam seems to slide free, so that he is at once lying on the floor of the hospital room, struggling with the demon-orderlies, and another is standing apart from the fray, leaning against the wall, observing, Lucifer beside him.
The Devil turns to him. “Helter-Skelter!” he says, cheerily, and steps forward.
“No!” cries Sam, the one on the wall, reaching uselessly for the Devil as he steps forward. Sam, the other one, throws off the demons, tossing them across the room like rag-dolls. Lucifer reaches him and the two merge in a moment of bright, shocking light, pouring and spilling around the room like a flash-bang grenade.
Somewhere distantly Sam can hear the sounds of struggle, gunfire and running and a voice calling his name, urgent and frantic. “Sam! SAMMY!”
The Devil straightens up in Sam's body ( am I really that tall?) and smiles, blood still smeared across his mouth.
Around them, the building trembles, as if the very fabric of reality is shivering in the cold.
“Sammy can't come to the phone right now,” he says.
********************************
Author: cordelia_gray
Rating/Pairings: Gen, R for language and a little blood.
Words: 2216
Warnings: Language, blood, dark themes.
Notes: Very belated spn-j2-xmas gift for the delightful monicawoe.
Sorry this is so late, bb! I hope you like it, I tried to include as many of your likes as I could :) It's inspired by your first prompt, about how Lucifer seeps back in, because Sam said yes, and there are no take-backs.
Thanks to de_nugis for a lighting-quick beta - you make everything you touch better! All remaining errors are all mine. Thanks also to bertee and the other mods for running this lovely challenge, and being so patient and wise.
For His Hands Are So Cold
I'm fixing a hole where the rain gets in, and stops my mind from wandering...
“Shut the fuck up!” Sam yells. He'd throw something, a pillow, anything, if he had the energy. Not that it would do any good. Not that he's even supposed to be talking to him. He's not real. He's not.
“Oh, Sammy, Sammy, so rude,” the Devil tsks at him from his perch atop the dresser in the corner of the room. He's wearing scrubs today, for some reason, just like Sam's. White. “Didn't your mama teach you better manners?”
Sam's back to not answering. He can feel his mouth compressed into a thin line with the effort not to respond, not to rise to the bait.
“No, I guess she didn't, did she?” The Devil puts his hand to mouth, in a parody of regret. “Oops! My bad.”
Sam closes his eyes, leans back against the wall. He can resist this, for a little bit longer. He's being tormented by a figment of his own fucked-up brain, that's all it is. Not real. He can't die until Dean gets back. He can hold out a little longer.
The Devil is blessedly silent for a moment, causing an utterly irrational hope to leap into Sam's throat. He opens his eyes to see that the orderlies are arriving with the dinner trays. The Devil is watching the process curiously, letting the noise of the trolley, the banging doors, the orderlies' chatter, the other inmates complaints do his work for him.
Sam manages a tired smile when a young man with dark hair and kind eyes hands him a tray. “Try to eat,” he says. “Real food's better than all this, you know.” He gestures at the tubes in Sam's arm.
“I'll try,” Sam says. “Thank you.”
The orderlies leave Sam's tray of food and meds on the dresser by the door.
Lucifer peers at it intently for a moment, then passes his hand across the top. Sam can see the food wilting and rotting with the motion, the vegetables going moldy, the meat turning black. The scent of food changes to a sickly odor of decay, filling the room.
Sam wants to be sick. He wants to cry. He is so hungry. He can't even remember the last time he ate. His throat is still raw from the feeding tube they'd had him on when he first got here. He needs to eat.
“Ah-ah-ah,” the Devil says, wagging a finger at Sam. “This is not for you. I need you hungry, when the time comes.”
“What do you mean, when the time comes? What are you talking about?”
But the Devil is ignoring him now (given the cold shoulder by a figment of his own imagination). He's back to the Beatles song, humming a little, playing an imaginary harpsichord, filling a corner of the room with a full-on orchestra in Sgt. Pepper regalia.
I'm painting my room in the colorful way, and when my mind is wandering, there I will go...
“STOP IT!” Sam finds himself standing in the center of the room, yelling over the music. “You don't get to do this, I don't care about Stairway to Heaven, ok? It's a shitty song, I don't care what Dean says, it's just high school slow-dance crap. But you don't get this! You don't get Sgt. Pepper's! It's not fair!”
The Devil laughs, delighted. “That's the spirit!”
The orderly has returned, drawn by the noise. Sam is acutely aware that he is standing in his bare feet in the middle of an empty room, yelling at someone who isn't there.
( Yesterday, upon the stair, I met a man who wasn't there. He wasn't there again today, oh how I wish he'd go away.)
“Sorry, sorry,” Sam is babbling, over the sound of Lucifer murmuring behind him. “I thought there was someone here, I'm sorry.”
“Did you take your meds?” The orderly is asking him something, he needs to answer, he needs to get this right. But the words don't come, drowned in the cacaphony of crashing cymbals and strings swelling from some unseen corner of the room. There's a struggle, something sharp, it pricks like a thorn, leading Sam down into darkness.
I'm filling the cracks that ran through the door
And kept my mind from wandering
Where it will go
And it really doesn't matter if I'm wrong I'm right
Where I belong I'm right
Where I belong...
When he comes up again, time has passed. He hasn't been asleep, not really, just not quite there, lost the plot for a while. It's not a rest, no rest for the wicked, but at least he doesn't remember it, which is something.
“The Beatles, huh?” The Devil is watching him, not in scrubs anymore, jeans and boots and flannel. Like Dean, Dean dresses like that. “Dean isn't coming back, Sammy. You know that, right? He can't save you - this is just between you and me.” The Devil grins, leans forward. “It's the way it was always meant to be, Sam. You and me against the world. It's the way it's always going to be.”
“No,” Sam says, quiet but firm. “No. We beat you. You're down in the hole, and I'm up here. We won.”
Lucifer laughs.
“You said 'yes', Sam. You let me in, there's no going back on your word. I will be with you, always. And I always win.”
Sam crosses his arms over his chest. They've been up and down all sides of this argument for who knows how long - days, weeks, centuries, forever and a day. He's not going to engage, he knows how it goes.
“You can't shut me out, Sam. I'm in your head, remember?”
Sam shrugs. “This isn't my first rodeo, you know. I've had a lot of practice with hallucinations. I know one when I see one.”
The Devil clasps his heart dramatically. “You wound me, Sammy. Denying my existence like that - it's enough to hurt my pride.”
Sam shrugs again.
A monkey with a miniature cymbal, clashing wildly, out of tune and out of rhythm, rolls across the floor. He's wearing a Sgt. Pepper jacket.
“Let's get back to a more interesting conversation, shall we?” Lucifer has settled on the bed right next to Sam. If he turns his head, he'll be right there on the pillow.
Sam doesn't turn his head, just recrosses his arms and stares at the crack in the plaster on the opposite wall. He can almost see the tip of Lucifer's boots resting casually on the white bedspread, out of his peripheral vision. He ignores them.
“See, it's you reaction to the Beatles that really interests me,” the Devil says, in a casual conversational tone. “You seem to feel like there are things I shouldn't touch, things I don't get to have. Your little girlfriend - Jessica, right? Or some kinds of pop music. I don't know why you try to keep me out, Sam. You're mine, remember? You said 'yes'. You let me in. You don't get to keep certain things for yourself, you know.”
He's off again, waltzing around the room, swelling strings surrounding him. “All of me, why not take aaaallll of me,” voice smoky, torch singer crooning with just a hint of violin somewhere behind him.
Sam's reciting Latin exorcisms in his head, trying to block it out, to remove himself from the room, just let the madness wash over him in waves, to find a still point in the center, a rock to cling to in the shifting seas of Lucifer's mercuriality.
But the song's shifted again, now it's “Hey Jude,” and Sam can't help but flinch. Just a tiny one, but the Devil catches it, all up in his face again.
“Just because Mother Mary liked them, Sammy, doesn't mean they're something special. Just another rock band, climbing over everyone for fame and fortune, drugs and groupies. They're no better than they should be.” He cocks his head. “Hell, they're practically made for corruption by demons. 'Helter Skelter' ring any bells?”
“I'm not Charlie Manson,” Sam says, flatly. “He was just some guy who had a psychotic break, and was charismatic enough to take a few people with him.”
The Devil laughs. “So innocent, Sam. You think Manson was just an ordinary psycho? No, he was one of mine. One of Azazel's special children. He didn't work out, though. Not strong enough. Not like you, Sam.”
Lucifer leans in close, whispering,“You're Charlie Manson if I want you to be, Sammy.” His smile is cold as ice, it feels like all the warmth has been leached out of the room. He runs his hand lightly through the days-old stubble on Sam's cheeks. “Look, you're even growing the beard for it. And the Jesus hair. But Manson, he a was a little toad. You're so much better than he was. Tall, handsome. Great abs. A vessel fit for a king, really.”
Lucifer steps back. “You see, Sam, you think you're here and I'm down there, but that's the thing - we're connected, you and I. 'When you get to the bottom, you go back to the top of the slide, you stop and you turn and you go for a ride, till you get to the bottom and I see you agaiiinnn!”
The music swells again, loud and fast and urgent. Lucifer rocking out on air guitar, some grotesque parody of karaoke night.
“You can't run, Sam. You can't hide. You bring me with you, wherever you go. We're made for each other, remember? It's always going to be the way it was. There's only one way this story goes: I win, so - I win.”
“NO!” Sam screams, hands over his ears. He tries to stand, to face him head-on, to refute this stupid argument, but his traitorous legs won't hold him up, and he crashes to the floor.
There's a loud, discordant crash of cymbals. The Devil smiles. “They're here,” he says, all creepy song-song. “Showtime, Sammy!” He strikes a jazz-hands pose, and vanishes.
Sam can hear some confusion in the hall outside his room, someone approaching. It's the orderlies again, the one who gave him dinner, with the dark hair and the kind eyes pushing a gurney with alarming-looking bondage gear. His eyes are no longer kind: they're inky-black.
Sam, still on the floor, scrambles back against the bed, searching for a weapon, anything, a way to hold them at bay. The door to his room crashes open, and - God, fuck, he can smell them. The scent of blood pumping through their veins, sulfur-laden and rich with power. Sam is ravenous, the starvation of the last weeks catching up with him all at once like a steam-train.
The demons reach for him, grabbing his hands and feet. “This is gonna be fun, Winchester,” the lead one growls. “We're going to have ourselves a party!”
The Devil watches from the wall, and smiles. “I needed you hungry.”
Sam can hear it now, the blood sluicing through the thick veins in the wrist of the demon holding him. They're bundling him on to the gurney, Sam trying to fight back but betrayed by the weakness of his body, limbs weak from exhaustion and malnourishment. His body has consumed itself in a desperate attempt to stay alive.
Sam turns his head and sinks his teeth into the demon's wrist.
Blood flows freely, like manna from heaven, and Sam drinks it greedily. He can feel the raw power seeping into him, filling all the empty spaces in his body, strength returning, blooming like a desert in the rain.
He meets Lucifer's eyes, bright with approval. Something curious happens then, a sense of dislocation, a twist in the fabric of reality. A part of Sam seems to slide free, so that he is at once lying on the floor of the hospital room, struggling with the demon-orderlies, and another is standing apart from the fray, leaning against the wall, observing, Lucifer beside him.
The Devil turns to him. “Helter-Skelter!” he says, cheerily, and steps forward.
“No!” cries Sam, the one on the wall, reaching uselessly for the Devil as he steps forward. Sam, the other one, throws off the demons, tossing them across the room like rag-dolls. Lucifer reaches him and the two merge in a moment of bright, shocking light, pouring and spilling around the room like a flash-bang grenade.
Somewhere distantly Sam can hear the sounds of struggle, gunfire and running and a voice calling his name, urgent and frantic. “Sam! SAMMY!”
The Devil straightens up in Sam's body ( am I really that tall?) and smiles, blood still smeared across his mouth.
Around them, the building trembles, as if the very fabric of reality is shivering in the cold.
“Sammy can't come to the phone right now,” he says.
********************************