SPN fic: Dead Don't Talk [Sam, Lucifer, Michael]
Title: “Dead Don’t Talk”
Author: Shaitanah
Rating: PG
Timeline: post-5x22, “Swan Song”
Summary: Sam learns from Lucifer. Lucifer learns from Sam. [very vague spoilers for Sam’s “condition” in early season 6]
Disclaimer: Kripke is God. Everything belongs to him.
A/N: Fighting my writer’s block every way that I can. ;) Oh God, it took me almost a year to write this. O_o e-nara, THANK YOU!
DEAD DON’T TALK
Sam is laughing.
It hurts. It is the pain of a thousand suns exploding beneath his eyelids, and he feels himself drifting away through the fall - but Lucifer clings to him ravenously, forcing him to stay, denying him the peace he yearns for. Sam’s body is on the verge of disintegration, flesh and thought ripping at the seams. Lucifer holds him together by sheer force of will, transcendent now that Sam has let him back into the driver’s seat; nothing matters anymore. Lucifer whispers maliciously, “Share it with me,” and Sam laughs within the chaos of their joint mind.
The cage beneath seems both small and spacious, crowded now that there are two of them, yet still desolate. There are at least three minds here, four if Adam has been unlucky enough to linger. Sam tastes it all. Michael’s Grace brushes against him through the armour of Lucifer’s anguished fury. It is… prickly.
Sam feels claustrophobic in his own head.
Adam - Michael - still clutches at Sam’s jacket as if his fingers have frozen in that position. Sam can’t decide whether it is a good or a bad thing that Adam’s shell still hasn’t burnt away.
The fall comes to an end eventually, and they lie head to head in a timeless abyss, the whipping wind still ringing in their ears, and then Lucifer takes a breath - Sam feels it, sharp, bonecrushing - and says quietly:
“It’s all your fault.”
As soon as Sam realizes the rebuke is addressed to Michael, he is torn between snickering, “What are you, five?” and jumping the accusatory bandwagon (he is pretty sure Adam agrees, too, even if he cannot voice his opinion).
Michael ignores his brother stubbornly.
“Bet it didn’t occur to you it might end this way.” Lucifer continues bitterly. “Bet you didn’t even bother to ask.”
Silence.
“He that diggeth a pit shall fall into it.” There is a biting edge to Lucifer’s voice.
Michael very nearly rolls his eyes. “Oh, for Heaven’s sake!”
“See? That is your problem! Try doing something for your sake once and see how it goes.”
Sam hates to point out that that was exactly what got Lucifer landed in the cage in the first place. On second thought, no, he doesn’t - and he readily points it out and promptly gets mentally electroshocked for the observation. But then, Sam has Free Willed himself into this situation as well, so he’s not one to talk after all.
“We don’t have to chat, you know,” Michael says.
“Fine,” Lucifer snaps.
Michael echoes: “Fine.”
Sam feels uncomfortable. Three’s a company.
* * *
Very soon Lucifer gets bored of playing ball with Sam’s consciousness. You can only take it out on one person for so long. Afterwards, Sam is pretty much on his own. So he watches and listens and understands.
He is almost amazed to discover how brotherly things are between Lucifer and Michael. Of course, he knew they were brothers and he heard them refer to each other as such - but the full impact of this realization is at times too much to take. Because at the heart of things, Lucifer and Michael are Sam and Dean - and not because Sam and Dean were designed to be their vessels. No, true brotherhood goes far beyond appearances.
Sam remembers moving to Stanford, uprooting himself from his father’s obscure world, the new intoxicating sensation of freedom poisoned slightly by bitterness and doubt. And he remembers - even though the memories are a bit muddled and not his own - Lucifer’s dizzying fall, the same mixture of sorrow and accusation in Michael’s eyes as there was at the cemetery moments (hours? days? years?) ago. Almost the same expression as the one in Dean’s eyes when Sam told him he couldn’t take that kind of life anymore.
“You’re not seriously drawing parallels, are you, Sam?” quips Lucifer. “I’m beginning to think you sympathize with me.”
It stuns Sam into quiet inaction for a while. Perhaps they have already been here for too long.
* * *
Michael can’t stop gawking at Lucifer when the latter begins to recite the Freddy Krueger nursery rhyme out of the blue. Sam recalls his own unnatural reaction to that movie: a normal child would be scared to death, whereas he and Dean couldn’t stop nitpicking. Real life monster-hunting would do that to you.
Sam wonders for a moment if Lucifer is peeking at his memories. He feels a stab of something akin to envy mingled with hope - and realizes once again that the feeling is not his. The thought hovers somewhere on the periphery of his mind, deformed and weary. A faded, worm-eaten dream of brotherhood, support, love.
“What?” Lucifer arches his eyebrows at Michael’s incredulous facial expression. “Oh, come on, that movie is ingenious! Even I can’t kill people in dreams.”
Sam is pretty sure that under different circumstances Michael’s glare could burn a hole in his body. Not here though. It’s funny how Sam can almost hear the words ‘bitch’ and ‘jerk’ suspended in the air.
“What are you waiting for?” Lucifer asks, suddenly serious. “For Dad to pull you out? Forget it, brother.”
To Sam’s vague surprise, Michael’s voice comes subdued and tired.
“I have my faith. Is it so wrong?”
Lucifer’s throat is burning, but he doesn’t say anything. Instead, he inclines his head slightly so that his temple touches Michael’s shoulder, just barely.
* * *
Sam dreams of watching the stars with Dean. Sitting on the hood of the Impala, drinking beer and looking up at the sky sprinkled with myriads of shiny dots - and not having to think of the wars raging up there. There was a time when the sky was just the sky and they thought that maybe angels did not exist.
Lucifer also dreams. He doesn’t exactly sleep, but he definitely wanders off somewhere when he takes a break from bickering with Michael or pilfering Sam’s memories for the fun of it. The Fallen dreams of the days before the fall when the whole of creation danced before his eyes in all its celestial splendour. The stars that Sam and Dean enjoyed watching - Lucifer had seen some of those being born.
Despite himself, Sam allows this burdensome knowledge of age and grandeur to engulf him. Beyond that, there is loneliness the likes of which no man has ever known.
Sam shifts closer to Adam’s familiar shape - and oddly, Michael does not jerk away.
* * *
Michael is bored. He doesn’t have to voice it; Lucifer feels his restlessness, and Sam wonders briefly why on earth he hasn’t begun to gloat yet. Perhaps Lucifer understands more than he is willing to let on.
When Dean is bored, he grabs a beer and goes on to tweak the car. Or he goes to a bar. Or he pulls pranks on Sam. At least that’s how things used to be before.
Michael falls into quiet despair. Sam thinks half-heartedly that it’s what he deserves, what all those dicks with wings deserve for choosing the human world as their playground; but Lucifer sees through all that and snickers at how human it really is to pity a fallen enemy.
When Dean is depressed, Sam doesn’t try to talk him through it. It’s no use. But he stays close, and they may watch a game and maybe talk about something stupid and irrelevant like they did that Christmas that Dean thought would be his last.
Lucifer doesn’t talk to Michael either. There is a way of communicating for angels, beyond the sanctity of one’s mind, and so Sam knows that whatever Lucifer thinks about becomes known to Michael either way, and sometimes Michael reacts. Those are the smallest signs like the tightening of his lips or a slight squint to his eyes, and soon Michael begins to think back.
They never mention Gabriel’s death by Lucifer’s hand or how Castiel burnt Michael and paid with his life for it. And they don’t exactly debate health food versus greasy cheeseburgers or iPod versus cassette player. But they too, like any siblings, have common memories that are significant for both of them. Lucifer’s memories of Heaven are bleary; it is as if watching scenery through a smokescreen or muddy water. Michael’s impressions of the human world are ancient - pre-Old Testament ancient - and Lucifer who displays a ridiculously vast knowledge of human slasher movies never loses the chance to taunt his brother with some unsavoury images.
Sam thinks like a hostage. While his captors are busy with each other, he may try to run. He still imagines the cage as an actual cage, and it baffles him that he can’t Monte Cristo his way out of it. Lucifer chuckles and calls him naïve.
* * *
Sam suspects the world may have ended. Centuries may have passed while he has been locked up, swimming in the swamp of the angels’ rotting grace, and he wonders if Dean has kept his promise, has lived a life. Where is Dean now? In the ground? And the rest of him, in Heaven? Dean would not like that very much.
It’s a parade of images in his mind, but his mind is not exactly a mind anymore. There is a never-ending echo of DeanDadMomBobbyEllenJoJess, and finally Lucifer snaps and yells at him to stop imagining things. There’s no one here, he says. He and Michael haven’t said a word to each other for centuries.
Sam tries to imagine what Dean will look like when he grows old. And then it strikes him that he has already seen old Dean and that sight leaves something to be desired. He would drink and grumble like Bobby - but maybe not, not if Lisa was around.
“Did anyone ever tell you,” Lucifer quips, “that you think about your brother way too much?”
“We don’t fire up the Apocalypse when we want to settle our differences,” Sam retorts.
When another wave of anxiety washes away, Sam determines how he feels. Not tormented. Not scared. Bored. It is the worst feeling ever.
* * *
He snaps out of his reverie to the steel-cold grip of something - someone? - tugging him upwards. Lucifer clings fast to his shell, and Sam splinters and struggles against the feeling of nakedness and cold and ends up losing. He and Lucifer are no longer in the same head, no longer in any head at all, and as they lie bare and defenseless in the sploshes of grace, Michael comments, observant:
“That was not our Father.”
“It took you,” Lucifer hisses to Sam. “Who would want to take you?”
But I’m here, Sam thinks. It took me, but I’m still here.
Maybe Dean has gone and done a stupid thing after all. Or maybe Cas came back to life like he had already done once before. But they left me behind, Sam wants to complain, and finds himself tongue-tied and weary. He urges himself not to think about the failed rescue attempt (quite a successful kidnapping attempt as far as Lucifer was concerned). Lucifer would be trying to crawl into Michael’s vessel now, and they will ruin what’s left of Adam and ruin what’s left of Sam and then ruin each other.
For the first time since the beginning of his imprisonment, everything comes crashing down on him. Loneliness. Pain. Sickness. Guilt. Everything the shell was unwittingly protecting him from. Worst of all, hope. Sam had secretly hope Dean would find a way. But even if it was Dean, he screwed up.
Sam is laughing again. It feels a little like dying and a lot like living forever.
* * *
Sam stands under the street-torch and thinks of nothing. Dean has kept his promise. Sam watches him with Lisa and Ben and evaluates: Good. He should probably knock on the door and tell Dean he is alive. Maybe ask Dean if a thank-you is in order.
On second thought, no. Dean would ask questions too.
Sam walks from one street-torch to another as they flicker, lighting the road that leads away from Lisa’s house. There is silence where Lucifer once was. If anything else is missing, Sam does not notice it. He knows that he is free and that freedom is good. That is all.
* * *
Back in the cage, no one talks to him anymore, and he doesn’t talk to anyone.
May 15, 2010 - March 11, 2011
Author: Shaitanah
Rating: PG
Timeline: post-5x22, “Swan Song”
Summary: Sam learns from Lucifer. Lucifer learns from Sam. [very vague spoilers for Sam’s “condition” in early season 6]
Disclaimer: Kripke is God. Everything belongs to him.
A/N: Fighting my writer’s block every way that I can. ;) Oh God, it took me almost a year to write this. O_o e-nara, THANK YOU!
DEAD DON’T TALK
Sam is laughing.
It hurts. It is the pain of a thousand suns exploding beneath his eyelids, and he feels himself drifting away through the fall - but Lucifer clings to him ravenously, forcing him to stay, denying him the peace he yearns for. Sam’s body is on the verge of disintegration, flesh and thought ripping at the seams. Lucifer holds him together by sheer force of will, transcendent now that Sam has let him back into the driver’s seat; nothing matters anymore. Lucifer whispers maliciously, “Share it with me,” and Sam laughs within the chaos of their joint mind.
The cage beneath seems both small and spacious, crowded now that there are two of them, yet still desolate. There are at least three minds here, four if Adam has been unlucky enough to linger. Sam tastes it all. Michael’s Grace brushes against him through the armour of Lucifer’s anguished fury. It is… prickly.
Sam feels claustrophobic in his own head.
Adam - Michael - still clutches at Sam’s jacket as if his fingers have frozen in that position. Sam can’t decide whether it is a good or a bad thing that Adam’s shell still hasn’t burnt away.
The fall comes to an end eventually, and they lie head to head in a timeless abyss, the whipping wind still ringing in their ears, and then Lucifer takes a breath - Sam feels it, sharp, bonecrushing - and says quietly:
“It’s all your fault.”
As soon as Sam realizes the rebuke is addressed to Michael, he is torn between snickering, “What are you, five?” and jumping the accusatory bandwagon (he is pretty sure Adam agrees, too, even if he cannot voice his opinion).
Michael ignores his brother stubbornly.
“Bet it didn’t occur to you it might end this way.” Lucifer continues bitterly. “Bet you didn’t even bother to ask.”
Silence.
“He that diggeth a pit shall fall into it.” There is a biting edge to Lucifer’s voice.
Michael very nearly rolls his eyes. “Oh, for Heaven’s sake!”
“See? That is your problem! Try doing something for your sake once and see how it goes.”
Sam hates to point out that that was exactly what got Lucifer landed in the cage in the first place. On second thought, no, he doesn’t - and he readily points it out and promptly gets mentally electroshocked for the observation. But then, Sam has Free Willed himself into this situation as well, so he’s not one to talk after all.
“We don’t have to chat, you know,” Michael says.
“Fine,” Lucifer snaps.
Michael echoes: “Fine.”
Sam feels uncomfortable. Three’s a company.
* * *
Very soon Lucifer gets bored of playing ball with Sam’s consciousness. You can only take it out on one person for so long. Afterwards, Sam is pretty much on his own. So he watches and listens and understands.
He is almost amazed to discover how brotherly things are between Lucifer and Michael. Of course, he knew they were brothers and he heard them refer to each other as such - but the full impact of this realization is at times too much to take. Because at the heart of things, Lucifer and Michael are Sam and Dean - and not because Sam and Dean were designed to be their vessels. No, true brotherhood goes far beyond appearances.
Sam remembers moving to Stanford, uprooting himself from his father’s obscure world, the new intoxicating sensation of freedom poisoned slightly by bitterness and doubt. And he remembers - even though the memories are a bit muddled and not his own - Lucifer’s dizzying fall, the same mixture of sorrow and accusation in Michael’s eyes as there was at the cemetery moments (hours? days? years?) ago. Almost the same expression as the one in Dean’s eyes when Sam told him he couldn’t take that kind of life anymore.
“You’re not seriously drawing parallels, are you, Sam?” quips Lucifer. “I’m beginning to think you sympathize with me.”
It stuns Sam into quiet inaction for a while. Perhaps they have already been here for too long.
* * *
Michael can’t stop gawking at Lucifer when the latter begins to recite the Freddy Krueger nursery rhyme out of the blue. Sam recalls his own unnatural reaction to that movie: a normal child would be scared to death, whereas he and Dean couldn’t stop nitpicking. Real life monster-hunting would do that to you.
Sam wonders for a moment if Lucifer is peeking at his memories. He feels a stab of something akin to envy mingled with hope - and realizes once again that the feeling is not his. The thought hovers somewhere on the periphery of his mind, deformed and weary. A faded, worm-eaten dream of brotherhood, support, love.
“What?” Lucifer arches his eyebrows at Michael’s incredulous facial expression. “Oh, come on, that movie is ingenious! Even I can’t kill people in dreams.”
Sam is pretty sure that under different circumstances Michael’s glare could burn a hole in his body. Not here though. It’s funny how Sam can almost hear the words ‘bitch’ and ‘jerk’ suspended in the air.
“What are you waiting for?” Lucifer asks, suddenly serious. “For Dad to pull you out? Forget it, brother.”
To Sam’s vague surprise, Michael’s voice comes subdued and tired.
“I have my faith. Is it so wrong?”
Lucifer’s throat is burning, but he doesn’t say anything. Instead, he inclines his head slightly so that his temple touches Michael’s shoulder, just barely.
* * *
Sam dreams of watching the stars with Dean. Sitting on the hood of the Impala, drinking beer and looking up at the sky sprinkled with myriads of shiny dots - and not having to think of the wars raging up there. There was a time when the sky was just the sky and they thought that maybe angels did not exist.
Lucifer also dreams. He doesn’t exactly sleep, but he definitely wanders off somewhere when he takes a break from bickering with Michael or pilfering Sam’s memories for the fun of it. The Fallen dreams of the days before the fall when the whole of creation danced before his eyes in all its celestial splendour. The stars that Sam and Dean enjoyed watching - Lucifer had seen some of those being born.
Despite himself, Sam allows this burdensome knowledge of age and grandeur to engulf him. Beyond that, there is loneliness the likes of which no man has ever known.
Sam shifts closer to Adam’s familiar shape - and oddly, Michael does not jerk away.
* * *
Michael is bored. He doesn’t have to voice it; Lucifer feels his restlessness, and Sam wonders briefly why on earth he hasn’t begun to gloat yet. Perhaps Lucifer understands more than he is willing to let on.
When Dean is bored, he grabs a beer and goes on to tweak the car. Or he goes to a bar. Or he pulls pranks on Sam. At least that’s how things used to be before.
Michael falls into quiet despair. Sam thinks half-heartedly that it’s what he deserves, what all those dicks with wings deserve for choosing the human world as their playground; but Lucifer sees through all that and snickers at how human it really is to pity a fallen enemy.
When Dean is depressed, Sam doesn’t try to talk him through it. It’s no use. But he stays close, and they may watch a game and maybe talk about something stupid and irrelevant like they did that Christmas that Dean thought would be his last.
Lucifer doesn’t talk to Michael either. There is a way of communicating for angels, beyond the sanctity of one’s mind, and so Sam knows that whatever Lucifer thinks about becomes known to Michael either way, and sometimes Michael reacts. Those are the smallest signs like the tightening of his lips or a slight squint to his eyes, and soon Michael begins to think back.
They never mention Gabriel’s death by Lucifer’s hand or how Castiel burnt Michael and paid with his life for it. And they don’t exactly debate health food versus greasy cheeseburgers or iPod versus cassette player. But they too, like any siblings, have common memories that are significant for both of them. Lucifer’s memories of Heaven are bleary; it is as if watching scenery through a smokescreen or muddy water. Michael’s impressions of the human world are ancient - pre-Old Testament ancient - and Lucifer who displays a ridiculously vast knowledge of human slasher movies never loses the chance to taunt his brother with some unsavoury images.
Sam thinks like a hostage. While his captors are busy with each other, he may try to run. He still imagines the cage as an actual cage, and it baffles him that he can’t Monte Cristo his way out of it. Lucifer chuckles and calls him naïve.
* * *
Sam suspects the world may have ended. Centuries may have passed while he has been locked up, swimming in the swamp of the angels’ rotting grace, and he wonders if Dean has kept his promise, has lived a life. Where is Dean now? In the ground? And the rest of him, in Heaven? Dean would not like that very much.
It’s a parade of images in his mind, but his mind is not exactly a mind anymore. There is a never-ending echo of DeanDadMomBobbyEllenJoJess, and finally Lucifer snaps and yells at him to stop imagining things. There’s no one here, he says. He and Michael haven’t said a word to each other for centuries.
Sam tries to imagine what Dean will look like when he grows old. And then it strikes him that he has already seen old Dean and that sight leaves something to be desired. He would drink and grumble like Bobby - but maybe not, not if Lisa was around.
“Did anyone ever tell you,” Lucifer quips, “that you think about your brother way too much?”
“We don’t fire up the Apocalypse when we want to settle our differences,” Sam retorts.
When another wave of anxiety washes away, Sam determines how he feels. Not tormented. Not scared. Bored. It is the worst feeling ever.
* * *
He snaps out of his reverie to the steel-cold grip of something - someone? - tugging him upwards. Lucifer clings fast to his shell, and Sam splinters and struggles against the feeling of nakedness and cold and ends up losing. He and Lucifer are no longer in the same head, no longer in any head at all, and as they lie bare and defenseless in the sploshes of grace, Michael comments, observant:
“That was not our Father.”
“It took you,” Lucifer hisses to Sam. “Who would want to take you?”
But I’m here, Sam thinks. It took me, but I’m still here.
Maybe Dean has gone and done a stupid thing after all. Or maybe Cas came back to life like he had already done once before. But they left me behind, Sam wants to complain, and finds himself tongue-tied and weary. He urges himself not to think about the failed rescue attempt (quite a successful kidnapping attempt as far as Lucifer was concerned). Lucifer would be trying to crawl into Michael’s vessel now, and they will ruin what’s left of Adam and ruin what’s left of Sam and then ruin each other.
For the first time since the beginning of his imprisonment, everything comes crashing down on him. Loneliness. Pain. Sickness. Guilt. Everything the shell was unwittingly protecting him from. Worst of all, hope. Sam had secretly hope Dean would find a way. But even if it was Dean, he screwed up.
Sam is laughing again. It feels a little like dying and a lot like living forever.
* * *
Sam stands under the street-torch and thinks of nothing. Dean has kept his promise. Sam watches him with Lisa and Ben and evaluates: Good. He should probably knock on the door and tell Dean he is alive. Maybe ask Dean if a thank-you is in order.
On second thought, no. Dean would ask questions too.
Sam walks from one street-torch to another as they flicker, lighting the road that leads away from Lisa’s house. There is silence where Lucifer once was. If anything else is missing, Sam does not notice it. He knows that he is free and that freedom is good. That is all.
* * *
Back in the cage, no one talks to him anymore, and he doesn’t talk to anyone.
May 15, 2010 - March 11, 2011