Dream On, for balder12
Title: Dream On
Recipient: balder12
Rating: M: suitable for teens, 13 years and older, with some violence, minor coarse language, and minor suggestive adult themes.
Word Count: 5,500 words
Warnings: Mention of torture/abuse and psychotropic substances.
Author's Notes: I am so happy I got to participate in the SPN SummerGen challenge. This is my first Supernatural fanfic so I hope it is a good foray into the fandom. I hope I stuck to the prompt enough, but this fic had a mind of its own.
Summary: After the events of The Vessel, Sam Winchester is still having intense dreams about the Cage and Lucifer. Unable to determine whether it is his own damaged psyche or Lucifer’s meddling that is causing his constant nightmares, he tries to find some solution to his uncertainty.
~*~
After shattering every cell in his body, the thing about it that truly brought him despair was the size. Human beings were used to constancy, to the laws of physics and mathematics. He remembered his required science classes and how the equations were dumbed down just enough for college freshmen to understand. Suddenly all that worthless math crap suddenly had a place, and the universe became grander in a way. Sure, ghosts, werewolves, and shapeshifters had offered the modern world a terrifying depth that most people on this spinning rock would never understand. Mathematics, however, had brought order to the chaos of magic and demons (even if he could only begin to grasp it). The universe was vast and infinite, but everything followed certain laws. What came up must fall down, actions had equal and opposite reactions, matter could not be created or destroyed, and unless you were going at impossibly fast speeds, distance was the same when you measured it.
If you were trapped in a box, it was supposed to be the same size.
Size and dimensions had no meaning there. There was no schematic or visual representation of the Cage that could properly be understood by the human brain or soul. Even those things in relation to another had no meaning. His body had jumped into a pit with an archangel and a soul. The body could be destroyed infinite times and reassembled with the same pieces. The body was constrained to the laws. Every drop of blood, every subatomic particle was simultaneously gathered and rearranged in a familiar pattern with the ease of a snap. His memories had come back all at once, all in chaos, not even truly processed. How could centuries of torture be processed in human months or years? Most of it could bleed into each other, creating an amalgamated but linear memory of similar burning, tearing, biting, clawing.
Not the size though. Not his limited senses trying to make sense of prison capable of containing an extra-dimensional celestial presence of pure power. Could even the greatest scientific minds on earth even begin to classify what an angel was? At some point he remembered it making sense down there. Now, it was lost. The easiest way he could explain the size of the Cage was like being in complete darkness. Not the dark of night or even in a basement; complete darkness. Darkness so thick you forgot where you were in the world. Directions were meaningless. At the same time, the size could be a coffin to contain his body or soul, could be the infinite universe, or it could be that metal box suspended over a lightning filled void in deepest pit of Hell.
His dreams were not capable of truly representing the sheer terror of being in a place like that-a place where he was both suffocated by closeness and drowned in vast emptiness. So instead he saw the metal suspended box over infinite darkness that even the demons feared. Much like how his sleeping brain could not properly rearrange what an archangel truly looked like so he saw a human vessel in its place.
“Stop it.” His voice was gravelly, trying far too hard to be strong but cracking and splintering like a mirror under a bloody fist.
“Stop it.” The other repeated like this was nothing more than a childish repetition game meant to drive others to sheer infuriated annoyance.
His lip twitched, fist clenching around tearing, freezing, burning metallic walls as he huddled at the edge of the Cage. Even after years, he could not stop this idiotic reaction. He could not stop himself from shrinking away as if that would do him any good. The bloodied ends of his hair caught his eyelashes and he tried to blink it away. In Hell, even the smallest of annoyances were hyper-exaggerated to the point of ridiculousness. That tickling hair felt like razor blades across his corneas. Pain was relative though. If hair in his eye felt like razor blades, then how was he supposed to describe having his ribcage broken and reassembled backwards underneath his skin?
“C’mon Sam… Sammy, this is who you are-who we are.”
“I am nothing like-”
“Ah, don’t finish that sentence.” He needed only to flick his finger and whatever passed for oxygen here was gone.
It would have been simpler to rip out his tongue, but that did not instill the same desperate terror as suffocating did. He would rather suffocate a thousand times over, than see Lucifer wear that face.
His face.
“Isn’t that the reason we’re here? It wasn’t enough being in the same body was it?” He laughed. He hated that laugh-hated that he had not heard that laugh for longer than he could remember. Not Lucifer’s laugh, but his laugh. “You had to have me all to yourself, is that it?”
Sam tried to stop his face from breaking out into a million emotions. Disgust, hatred, terror, resentment, self-loathing. Torture someone long enough and they begin to believe anything.
“I mean, even when you finally got your soul back you missed me so much your broken mind conjured me up. You saw me every single day, didn’t you?” He loomed closer. “Saw me every second in that messed up trauma ridden brain of yours. I mean, not even Dean could get that close to you. If you think about it-truly think about it, I am the voice in your head. You know the one. The one that’s you, but you still think at and talk to. If you really think about it, I am you. And that doesn’t go away, not even when an angel shifts your crazy onto himself. That never goes away.”
He reached out an identical hand to Sam Winchester, his lips pulled in a soft serene smile. True torture required lulls like this-moments of reprieve or even of kindness so he began to remember what hope was again.
“You can’t torture someone who has nothing left for you to take away.”
“You didn’t need to release the Darkness for the chance to see me again.” His eyes narrowed. “All you had to do was look in a mirror.”
His fingers gently traced the side of his face with the simulation of tenderness. It was cold and terrifying, even if he should know what his own fingers felt like better than most.
“You need me to beat Amara, and you know it.”
Without warning, his entire jaw had been caved in by the smallest additional pressure on his face. Bone crunched and poked through flesh, blood splattering outward and painting Lucifer’s face (his face) red-
~*~
Sam Winchester’s eyes snapped open abruptly and his hands clawed at his jaw, feeling the stubble on his intact face, his sheets tangled around his tense body. His fingers almost felt numb as he groped at the rest of his undamaged face futilely, feeling that it had not caved in. He was covered in sweat. Hastily, he tore off the confining sheets and comforter as he threw his legs over the side of the bed and stifled a shivering shudder. It came anyways, and he wrapped his clenched hands around his sheets until he rode it out and his back was steady. It took several minutes, but he wiped at his face, pulling down on his skin and checking again to see if Lucifer had torn it off and worn it like a mask. He sighed heavily, his breath hot and stuttered as he looked around his Spartan room helplessly.
By now, he thought the dreams would stop. He knew he was not receiving messages from God-of course not. How conceited and self-righteous did you have to be to believe a God who had not even shown his face for the Apocalypse would be personally sending him (the abomination, the boy with the demon blood, the one who failed the Trials and abandoned Dean in Purgatory) messages? Of course not. Too good to be true. You would think he would have learned by now. He shook his head angrily, berating himself mentally.
Before Cas…well before they found out what Cas had did, he could excuse the continuing dreams as Lucifer messing with him just for the hell of it. It was not like he had much to do in his prison with his favorite toy gone. He assumed the dreams were just another thing he had to live with, like when he had hallucinated about him after Cas broke the wall. If the cracks in the Cage were there, of course the archangel would utilize them. With Lucifer out and riding Cas, Sam Winchester assumed he would be too busy dealing with the Amara situation to pay much attention to tormenting him in his off time. It would be much simpler to kill him; his impatience had been the purpose of the revelation in the first place.
As Sam finally got his heart-rate to slow to something normal, he sighed heavily and got to his feet. He stretched and considered going for a run to work out the dream--to forget it briefly in something as pure and simple as running. Of course, that would bring its own set of questions and eye rolls.
“Dude, why’re you running? Running sucks.”
He didn’t feel like dealing with the second degree from Dean. Explaining why he was running would lead to the dreams, and he did not want to open that particular can of worms right now…especially since he did not even know for sure if Lucifer messing with him! He could not be sure, short of asking and wouldn’t that be fun. It’s not like this was the first time he dreamed about the Cage, although the dreams had been more intense and violent after…well he supposed he should be used to it. Lucifer used his soul as his plaything in the Cage for immeasurable time. So what if he had reached into his chest, staring at him with the eyes of a friend? It was just another day in the life.
He groggily made his way towards the coffee maker. His eyelids drooped and he yawned as he went through the motions he did every morning. Fill up the carafe with water, flip open the lid, dump the water in. Take the old filter out, throw it away, put new filter in, add the grounds, close the lid, press the button.
Wait.
His eyes zoned out as he listened to the machine heat up.
There were a few options. He could try to sleep as little as possible-which was not much of a stretch considering he spent his days either researching the nothing they had on the Darkness, scanning the internet for signs of Amara or Lucifer, trying to find Hands of God, doodling the sigils that kept out archangels over and over until it was as easy as writing his own name, and going through the endless amount of material the Men of Letters had on everything and nothing. There was so much of it, all fascinating, but often times never truly helpful in the moment. So, technically he was already employing the sleep deprivation method. Unsurprisingly this was proving ineffective.
He could ignore the problem; accept it as something he had to deal with. This was the most compelling option. It would certainly be the easiest. Accept his new reality, and eventually (if it was not Lucifer’s doing) the dreams would ease a bit. He supposed he was doing this by default. The ‘do nothing’ approach. Of course, if it ended up being something real, then that was the perfect opportunity to receive another lecture from Dean on keeping secrets. Considering his screw-up in going to Hell, talking to the Lucifer, and giving the archangel the opportunity to escape, he was not too keen on that option. Not if he had to face that silent recrimination in his brother’s eyes.
The coffee began to drip at first into the pot before becoming a steady brown stream which emanated heat and one of his favorite scents of all time.
The third option: do something-always the most dangerous option. This had more potential for screw-up than the do-nothing approach. If he told Dean, that was another argument waiting to happen. If he didn’t tell him and screwed up, well then he was back at option 2 again. Dean always said he wanted to know what was going on with him (how screwed up he was) but when it came down to it, he really didn’t.
“I mean look at our lives. How many more hits can we take? So if Sam says he’s good? Good.”
Option 3 did have a bit of a cheat. It was not like he could do anything right now-not without information. So he could research. He could read everything the Men of Letters had about dreams. It was not like they had not gone over what was known about Archangel’s powers over and over, adding their own information from their personal experiences. There was the African Dream Root (their go-to cure-all for anything supernaturally dream related). Surely the Men of Letters had a better way to control dreams-a way that even Archangel’s couldn’t get past. Maybe there was a simple solution that had no dire consequences that he did not have to tell Dean about.
So he could cheat and research dreams instead of getting nowhere with the Darkness. Dean didn’t ask many questions when he saw his brother’s head buried in a book. Besides, he was too busy doing his own ineffectual research and brooding about how to get Castiel back. Sam did not believe the Men of Letters had anything to say about two angels inhabiting the same vessel which had been personally reconstructed from being atomized on two separate occasions (at least). It was all pointless anyways if Castiel did not want to kick him out in the first place. If Dean did ask pointed questions, Sam could make up the excuse that maybe they could reach Cas via dream.
Did Angels dream?
Two for one then. It was making Option 3 sound even better.
~*~
“Sam.”
He gripped his hand, pressing against the palm of where a well-worn and deep scar remained as a lasting reminder of the time his madness had won. This sucky, crapfest of a life had finally beat him. He was an Olympian at pushing past the trauma and the personal shit by this point. Even before anything truly terrible happened he was a champion of evasion. At Stanford, he gave vague normal answers about his childhood. Even when Jess pressed for more information, trying to trip him up when he had drank a little too much, he never really gave away anything substantial.
Born in Kansas. Family moved around a lot. One brother, one dad, no mom.
Sometimes he had to add details to embellish, but Sam Winchester had become a pro at changing the subject.
So here he was, ignoring the hallucination once more. You’re just tired. He told himself.
“Sammy.”
He forced himself to look past the human image of Lucifer. He could take any form he wanted, but his brain seemed dead set on seeing him how he did that first time in his dream. A hand grasping his shoulder and then an unfamiliar voice as if it belonged there just as much as Jess did.
“You can pretend to ignore me all you want, but we both know I won. I will always win. You can cause and avert as many apocalypses as you want, but I will always be here. If not in your broken gourd, then in the Cage. And when you die-”
Sam Winchester snorted.
“When I die, I die this time. I get thrown into the Empty.”
“Interesting theory, but no.”
Sam went back to ignoring the hallucination.
“Do you really think some reaper gets to decide that? I get the dramatic death-wish. ‘Luci, I just can’t take the pain…’ but Sammy, how many times have you tried to die before? Dean won’t let you. Hell, I won’t let you.”
He forced himself not to shudder at that promise. This was all in his head. This was all his brain dealing with all his personal crap and centuries of torture. It was fine.
“I mean, think about it for a bit, Sammy. Gadreel-”
Sam’s eyes snapped towards the hallucination. This wasn’t right. Something wasn’t right here. Nothing was making sense.
“Gadreel was the biggest chump in all the universe--God’s most trusted.” Lucifer rolled his eyes and crossed his arms with a mocking shake of his head. “Was the biggest chump. Did you miss me that much, Sammy? Did you miss me so much that you had to get yourself possessed by an angel as stupid and pathetic as you are? You had to have known somehow, right? How else were you possessed? But Luci, you say. I was tricked!” He shook his head sadly. “I don’t think that’s going to hold up in court, buddy.”
He pressed harder on his hand-scar, but the image only flickered a little bit. The hallucination seemed a little affronted by the attempted banishing.
“Where was I? Oh yes, Gadreel was imprisoned since the dawn of time for being tricked by yours truly. What kind of punishment do you think you deserve for unleashing the literal, capital D, end of all light, matter, and goodness, DARKNESS?”
Sam closed his eyes and counted to ten. None of this made sense. He did not hallucinate like this-not anymore--not even under the worst fevers during the Trials. This could not be real.
“Do you really think you’re going to be let off that easy? Do you really think God, GOD who threw his favorite son into a cage, who imprisoned his own sister, old Testament wrathy big burrito G-O-D himself would let you just cease to exist? No Sam. Sammy, this ends the same way.”
Sam froze, eyes wide and he met his tormentor’s gaze directly. He shook his head in denial.
“This ends with you, in a box, tormented for all eternity.” He looked particularly smug and faux-hopeful. “With Amara or with me, who knows?”
He leaned in closer as if he had the secrets of the universe to tell.
“I hope it’s with me. I have so many new ideas.”
Without warning, the familiar began to dissolve around him. It disintegrated into dissilient spirals of darkness until he was encompassed completely by utter nothing. It was a cage of pure darkness. This time he shrieked for help, hating how weak he sounded. He called for Dean, for Castiel, for people long dead, and finally for God…but there was nothing and no one to answer.
~*~
Nothing.
He pushed the book away from him angrily, shaking his head with an eye-roll. The Men of Letters had thousands of pages of documents about dreaming. Personal experiments, research into lucid dreaming, dissertations on sleepwalking and narcolepsy, treatises on nightmares and REM. A three hundred page book written all by hand on lucid dreaming that looked a century old. Detailed and clinical lab notes on the effect of psychotropic drugs on dreams. A terrifying case study on five children who experienced sleep paralysis and saw the same horrifying monster reaching for them in their locked in bodies. Endless pages devoted to dream analysis: teeth falling out, falling, flying, showing up to work in your underwear. Did people in comas dream? Was there a connection between dreams and death? The Sandman: fact or fiction? They were well ahead of their time on the scientific side, but modern technology and research had already surpassed them. Every conclusion reached seemed to be along the same lines: dreams are a fascinating area of study which we fully do not understand at the moment. Further research is needed.
They knew about the African dream root. He had skimmed through a fifty page long-winded academic article if the amount of phosphorous in the soil Silene Capensis grew in affected the potency of the African dream root tea. Nothing new. Everything the Men of Letters had they already knew. His hopes had briefly raised when he found an old dusty file with a rough draft of a report. It was marked up and unfinished, covered in ink blotches, and hand corrected red ink with brutal comments from some sort of peer review process. Investigating the Connection Between Dreams and the Death-Glimpsing the Divine. None of it had been helpful, although it had brought up unpleasant memories of Heaven and Zachariah.
So he was back to what he already knew. African dream root. If it was Lucifer messing with him, he could take the gross tea and try to wrestle control of his dream from an archangel. Even if he had the practice-even if he was Freddy Krueger himself, he doubted he could do more than make Lucifer laugh at his attempts. It would amuse him for a second before he stomped him like a bug and reminded him just how weak Sam Winchester really was. Sam Winchester gave up the trials. Sam Winchester had no conviction. Sam Winchester screwed up everything he ever tried. Sam Winchester got Charlie killed and sacrificed the universe to save Dean from the Mark of Cain.
Option 2 then.
He rubbed at his eyes and glared at three days’ worth of wasted time, feeling a stab of guilt. That was time he could have spent trying to find Amara or save Cas. He glared at the hastily stapled papers from one of the more recent Men of Letters studies comparing the effects of different drugs on the sleep quality, dream retention, and the lucidity of the dreamer during conscious, semi-conscious, and unconscious activity. He admired the hand-drawn molecular drawings of the different molecules of the drugs. Magic mushrooms, peyote, LSD, heroin, THC, barbiturates, and on and on. He skimmed the paper once more for nothing better to do than to refuse giving up.
He let his mind wander a bit, wondering not for the first time what it would have been like if the Men of Letters had not been massacred by Abaddon. What would it be like growing up as a Legacy member? Would he have written something like this? Would he even shot a gun or stabbed a monster? Would he be like one of the many graduate students they had interviewed after some monster attack? Sometimes Sam found himself stuck on what he observed from their thought processes-how callous they could be sometimes in their curiosity, the questions they asked, that research mindset where they were looking for one answer but found another question.
No matter how hard he tried, he could not imagine his brother writing something like this.
He sighed again, flipping a page and asking a stupid question, maybe a question a Men of Letters or a graduate student might have asked.
If he could not wrest control of his dreams from an archangel, what would happen if he went in the opposite direction? What would happen if he destabilized his dreams altogether?
~*~
“Look at it.” Too blue eyes sneered down at the soul he held in his hands.
The pain was white hot at first, and then biting cold as if the very cold of space had been siphoned into his chest and left only crackling, ripping, tearing glassy breaks across the surface of his very being. Souls were like nuclear power plants for angels, and Sam Winchester’s was a nuclear reactor on the brink of a meltdown with that careless celestial hand pawing at it in the most indelicate way possible.
“Look at how ugly it is.”
Sam kept his eyes closed, not wanting to see what he meant by that. Memories came unbidden to his mind. There were only a few moments in his dark, twisted life as a hunter where he had been undone by something beautiful. When he thought he saw an angel for the first time; that pure bright light and the feeling of absolute peace and certainty. The utter tranquility of knowing that your faith (despite the darkness and death) was justified. Seeing his mother for the first time, young and alive. She was not just the blurred and smudged photograph brought out-a frozen moment that Sam would never be a part of. Even the angels falling as hundreds of meteors, almost like colorless fireworks as everything in his body failed. The world had narrowed to a point, surrounded by gray and black and encompassed by agony, but he remembered how the sky had lit up like the fourth of July. In a way, those moments did not compare to releasing Bobby’s soul from his arm during the second Trial. Maybe any source of light would have seemed incandescent after the dark stink of Hell and the muted nothing of Purgatory. Maybe it had been the trials themselves, their actions and completion seared into his consciousness without fading in the slightest. The human body was programmed to forget pain, but he could remember every exquisitely amazing and painful moment of that ultimate farce.
It didn’t matter, because even Dean had looked at the released soul with naked awe.
Souls were supposed to be beautiful. They were supposed to be this perfect unbreakable thing.
When his eyes were forced open he saw the abomination. Lucifer cocked his head as he stared at the glowing orb in his hand, his other hand left in Sam’s chest like a finger on a bookshelf. He had been yelled at as a kid by a librarian when he tried to re-shelve a book he had skimmed through. That was what his hand looked like, a place marker so he did not screw up putting his soul back. Still a glowing orb of light, his soul was dim and mucus-colored. The soft edges were sharp and bent as if the metaphysical had been beaten into solidity. Bleeding gashes marred the orb, oozing the pus-colored light that rotated like an unwilling planet trying to escape a black hole.
“I mean, at least it’s not black smoke, right?” Lucifer looked at him wryly, lips twitching into a fake concerned expression.
Sam was sure souls were not supposed to smell, but the taste of rotting corpses and burning flesh was so overwhelming he had to fight the urge to vomit all over himself.
“Not even I could make your soul that disgusting. And they call me the monster! It just figures. You ever think that God wanted you to jump in the Cage? I originally thought you were made for me-my true vessel--but maybe God made you so repulsive to torture even me… That makes you think, doesn’t it? It’s not enough that you’re some hunter freak with demon blood, but you’re a smug self-righteous son of a bitch too. You know what the first and greatest of man’s sins are, Sammy? I do.”
Lucifer toyed with the soul in his hand, but his face twitched with disgust as if the thing were cold and slimy.
“It’s Pride. You thought you were so special. You thought God would send you visions after your colossal screw-up. I mean, just imagine it! Imagine my Father asking me to bow down before someone like you. Is it really so hard to imagine why I rebelled?”
His fingers twitched inside of Sam’s chest, and the putrescent soul seemed to sag and deflate.
“Dad liked the pretty things. That’s why he made the angels first. He had to be in a special mood to make a monster. I guess there’s the real question, the one you can’t quite stop thinking about. Even I’m curious. Did Dad make your soul that ugly, or did you do it yourself? Free-will and all. It’s enough to give you a headache.”
He scowled at the ugly soul and its wisp of light. It really was worthless.
“Nothing to say?” He shrugged. “Well, can’t say I didn’t try to be nice…”
He squeezed, and Sam Winchester exploded into a rain of blood and guts for Dean to find.
~*~
“Dude, what the hell.” Dean Winchester looked blankly at his brother and the paraphernalia that was neatly spread before him.
He recognized a few things, and the smell of the African dream root tea was unmistakable. The meticulous nature of the panoply of ingredients belied just how random that selection seemed. Narrowed eyes passed over the table in confusion and suspicion as if it were another spread of lollipops, candy, cheetos, and a plate of marshmallow nachos. Except, this time, instead of foods he actually might eat (and hey maybe those marshmallow nachos might taste good) there were flowers, cinnamon, a kettle of water, a bottle of whiskey, some weird potato looking thing, random bottles of spices that looked recently purchased, and were those mushrooms?
“Um…”
Yes, the classic Sam Winchester response when he was caught in the act of doing something that could qualify as stupid.
He looked freaked.
“I swear to God Sammy, if this is another ‘release an ancient evil on accident’…thing I’m gonna…are those mushrooms?!”
He still could not get over the mushrooms.
“Uh, yeah.” He inched slightly towards the meticulously set up table, trying to block the visual with his body.
At least from what he had seen, none of the ingredients had looked witchy. No bones. No random animal parts. No weird carved stones. No weird markings. No evil looking books.
“I am too tried to stand here pulling teeth. Dude, just spit it out.” Dean pinched the bridge of his nose. He understood the African dream root tea, but why the extra ingredients?
Whether by conscious choice or not, his brother adopted a completely innocent expression followed by a sheepish smile and then a shake of his head.
“Well, I haven’t been sleeping well.”
“Dude, you never sleep well.”
“Um yeah, I just…”
“With Lucifer riding Cas and Amara…I mean we have our plate full. No one’s sleeping well.” He pointed out.
“It’s sort of an experiment.”
Sam was now trying the tactic of flooding Dean with so much information, talking super-fast and in big words that were probably not real. Dean tried to follow along at first, interrupt second, but then waited it out with eyes that screamed he was so done with this. Still, despite this overload of clearly useless information he needed one question answered.
“Why the mushrooms?”
“Um…”
Sam Winchester actually looked embarrassed. Not even being publicly groped by older women had created that particular expression over his face. He looked like a teenager briefly, which was a feat in itself. Dean’s eyes scanned the table again: the African dream root, the makings of a tea, the spices to cut the flavor, and mushrooms. Then it clicked in his head.
“Magic mushrooms?!”
“Um…”
“So you’re going to trip balls in your sleep. Is that your plan?”
“This study from John Hopkins states that they can have positive long lasting effects on your mental health and they’re relatively harmless.”
“What universe did I step into!?”
They both knew this argument could go round and around until they were sick of each other. The cat was already out of the bag, so to speak. They were both too sleep deprived and stressed to go ten rounds of dodging, evading, and accusing.
“They’re not just bad dreams, Dean. You remember when I thought God was sending me visions…”
“Yeah, and I told you-”
Sam held up his hand and cut his brother off.
“It was Lucifer. I know. That’s the point.”
“What?” He sounded exasperated.
“He’s messed with my dreams before. He’s messed with my head before. I…I’m not sure if…”
“If what?”
“If he’s still doing it. If he’s in my dreams.”
Dean looked like he was about to form the next argument, the next attack, the next reason why this was all so incredibly stupid. He stopped though. His mouth opened and then closed, and he looked down. He actually glared at the floor, ran a hand through his short spiky hair and then looked up at his clearly sleep-deprived, desperate brother.
“Sammy…” It was all that needed to be said, or at least all he really could say. It was all right. Sam knew what he meant.
Neither one of them wanted to bring up how messed up he had been after Castiel broke the wall in his head. Dean could not handle Lucifer, the loss of Castiel, the Darkness, and a messed-up brother on his own. He just couldn’t.
“Look, I know it’s crazy and…I don’t know what will happen. I just…need to know.”
“So you want to take ‘shrooms. What is this, college?”
“Dean-”
“No, I get it. You want to have tea with Puff the Magic Dragon and the friggin’ Mad Hatter in Wonderland.”
“…what?!”
“Fine.”
Sam blinked in absolute confusion and maybe a touch of horror. What the hell was happening? Was this a dream too?
“If you’re gonna trip balls in La-la land, then I’m coming with you.”
Recipient: balder12
Rating: M: suitable for teens, 13 years and older, with some violence, minor coarse language, and minor suggestive adult themes.
Word Count: 5,500 words
Warnings: Mention of torture/abuse and psychotropic substances.
Author's Notes: I am so happy I got to participate in the SPN SummerGen challenge. This is my first Supernatural fanfic so I hope it is a good foray into the fandom. I hope I stuck to the prompt enough, but this fic had a mind of its own.
Summary: After the events of The Vessel, Sam Winchester is still having intense dreams about the Cage and Lucifer. Unable to determine whether it is his own damaged psyche or Lucifer’s meddling that is causing his constant nightmares, he tries to find some solution to his uncertainty.
~*~
After shattering every cell in his body, the thing about it that truly brought him despair was the size. Human beings were used to constancy, to the laws of physics and mathematics. He remembered his required science classes and how the equations were dumbed down just enough for college freshmen to understand. Suddenly all that worthless math crap suddenly had a place, and the universe became grander in a way. Sure, ghosts, werewolves, and shapeshifters had offered the modern world a terrifying depth that most people on this spinning rock would never understand. Mathematics, however, had brought order to the chaos of magic and demons (even if he could only begin to grasp it). The universe was vast and infinite, but everything followed certain laws. What came up must fall down, actions had equal and opposite reactions, matter could not be created or destroyed, and unless you were going at impossibly fast speeds, distance was the same when you measured it.
If you were trapped in a box, it was supposed to be the same size.
Size and dimensions had no meaning there. There was no schematic or visual representation of the Cage that could properly be understood by the human brain or soul. Even those things in relation to another had no meaning. His body had jumped into a pit with an archangel and a soul. The body could be destroyed infinite times and reassembled with the same pieces. The body was constrained to the laws. Every drop of blood, every subatomic particle was simultaneously gathered and rearranged in a familiar pattern with the ease of a snap. His memories had come back all at once, all in chaos, not even truly processed. How could centuries of torture be processed in human months or years? Most of it could bleed into each other, creating an amalgamated but linear memory of similar burning, tearing, biting, clawing.
Not the size though. Not his limited senses trying to make sense of prison capable of containing an extra-dimensional celestial presence of pure power. Could even the greatest scientific minds on earth even begin to classify what an angel was? At some point he remembered it making sense down there. Now, it was lost. The easiest way he could explain the size of the Cage was like being in complete darkness. Not the dark of night or even in a basement; complete darkness. Darkness so thick you forgot where you were in the world. Directions were meaningless. At the same time, the size could be a coffin to contain his body or soul, could be the infinite universe, or it could be that metal box suspended over a lightning filled void in deepest pit of Hell.
His dreams were not capable of truly representing the sheer terror of being in a place like that-a place where he was both suffocated by closeness and drowned in vast emptiness. So instead he saw the metal suspended box over infinite darkness that even the demons feared. Much like how his sleeping brain could not properly rearrange what an archangel truly looked like so he saw a human vessel in its place.
“Stop it.” His voice was gravelly, trying far too hard to be strong but cracking and splintering like a mirror under a bloody fist.
“Stop it.” The other repeated like this was nothing more than a childish repetition game meant to drive others to sheer infuriated annoyance.
His lip twitched, fist clenching around tearing, freezing, burning metallic walls as he huddled at the edge of the Cage. Even after years, he could not stop this idiotic reaction. He could not stop himself from shrinking away as if that would do him any good. The bloodied ends of his hair caught his eyelashes and he tried to blink it away. In Hell, even the smallest of annoyances were hyper-exaggerated to the point of ridiculousness. That tickling hair felt like razor blades across his corneas. Pain was relative though. If hair in his eye felt like razor blades, then how was he supposed to describe having his ribcage broken and reassembled backwards underneath his skin?
“C’mon Sam… Sammy, this is who you are-who we are.”
“I am nothing like-”
“Ah, don’t finish that sentence.” He needed only to flick his finger and whatever passed for oxygen here was gone.
It would have been simpler to rip out his tongue, but that did not instill the same desperate terror as suffocating did. He would rather suffocate a thousand times over, than see Lucifer wear that face.
His face.
“Isn’t that the reason we’re here? It wasn’t enough being in the same body was it?” He laughed. He hated that laugh-hated that he had not heard that laugh for longer than he could remember. Not Lucifer’s laugh, but his laugh. “You had to have me all to yourself, is that it?”
Sam tried to stop his face from breaking out into a million emotions. Disgust, hatred, terror, resentment, self-loathing. Torture someone long enough and they begin to believe anything.
“I mean, even when you finally got your soul back you missed me so much your broken mind conjured me up. You saw me every single day, didn’t you?” He loomed closer. “Saw me every second in that messed up trauma ridden brain of yours. I mean, not even Dean could get that close to you. If you think about it-truly think about it, I am the voice in your head. You know the one. The one that’s you, but you still think at and talk to. If you really think about it, I am you. And that doesn’t go away, not even when an angel shifts your crazy onto himself. That never goes away.”
He reached out an identical hand to Sam Winchester, his lips pulled in a soft serene smile. True torture required lulls like this-moments of reprieve or even of kindness so he began to remember what hope was again.
“You can’t torture someone who has nothing left for you to take away.”
“You didn’t need to release the Darkness for the chance to see me again.” His eyes narrowed. “All you had to do was look in a mirror.”
His fingers gently traced the side of his face with the simulation of tenderness. It was cold and terrifying, even if he should know what his own fingers felt like better than most.
“You need me to beat Amara, and you know it.”
Without warning, his entire jaw had been caved in by the smallest additional pressure on his face. Bone crunched and poked through flesh, blood splattering outward and painting Lucifer’s face (his face) red-
~*~
Sam Winchester’s eyes snapped open abruptly and his hands clawed at his jaw, feeling the stubble on his intact face, his sheets tangled around his tense body. His fingers almost felt numb as he groped at the rest of his undamaged face futilely, feeling that it had not caved in. He was covered in sweat. Hastily, he tore off the confining sheets and comforter as he threw his legs over the side of the bed and stifled a shivering shudder. It came anyways, and he wrapped his clenched hands around his sheets until he rode it out and his back was steady. It took several minutes, but he wiped at his face, pulling down on his skin and checking again to see if Lucifer had torn it off and worn it like a mask. He sighed heavily, his breath hot and stuttered as he looked around his Spartan room helplessly.
By now, he thought the dreams would stop. He knew he was not receiving messages from God-of course not. How conceited and self-righteous did you have to be to believe a God who had not even shown his face for the Apocalypse would be personally sending him (the abomination, the boy with the demon blood, the one who failed the Trials and abandoned Dean in Purgatory) messages? Of course not. Too good to be true. You would think he would have learned by now. He shook his head angrily, berating himself mentally.
Before Cas…well before they found out what Cas had did, he could excuse the continuing dreams as Lucifer messing with him just for the hell of it. It was not like he had much to do in his prison with his favorite toy gone. He assumed the dreams were just another thing he had to live with, like when he had hallucinated about him after Cas broke the wall. If the cracks in the Cage were there, of course the archangel would utilize them. With Lucifer out and riding Cas, Sam Winchester assumed he would be too busy dealing with the Amara situation to pay much attention to tormenting him in his off time. It would be much simpler to kill him; his impatience had been the purpose of the revelation in the first place.
As Sam finally got his heart-rate to slow to something normal, he sighed heavily and got to his feet. He stretched and considered going for a run to work out the dream--to forget it briefly in something as pure and simple as running. Of course, that would bring its own set of questions and eye rolls.
“Dude, why’re you running? Running sucks.”
He didn’t feel like dealing with the second degree from Dean. Explaining why he was running would lead to the dreams, and he did not want to open that particular can of worms right now…especially since he did not even know for sure if Lucifer messing with him! He could not be sure, short of asking and wouldn’t that be fun. It’s not like this was the first time he dreamed about the Cage, although the dreams had been more intense and violent after…well he supposed he should be used to it. Lucifer used his soul as his plaything in the Cage for immeasurable time. So what if he had reached into his chest, staring at him with the eyes of a friend? It was just another day in the life.
He groggily made his way towards the coffee maker. His eyelids drooped and he yawned as he went through the motions he did every morning. Fill up the carafe with water, flip open the lid, dump the water in. Take the old filter out, throw it away, put new filter in, add the grounds, close the lid, press the button.
Wait.
His eyes zoned out as he listened to the machine heat up.
There were a few options. He could try to sleep as little as possible-which was not much of a stretch considering he spent his days either researching the nothing they had on the Darkness, scanning the internet for signs of Amara or Lucifer, trying to find Hands of God, doodling the sigils that kept out archangels over and over until it was as easy as writing his own name, and going through the endless amount of material the Men of Letters had on everything and nothing. There was so much of it, all fascinating, but often times never truly helpful in the moment. So, technically he was already employing the sleep deprivation method. Unsurprisingly this was proving ineffective.
He could ignore the problem; accept it as something he had to deal with. This was the most compelling option. It would certainly be the easiest. Accept his new reality, and eventually (if it was not Lucifer’s doing) the dreams would ease a bit. He supposed he was doing this by default. The ‘do nothing’ approach. Of course, if it ended up being something real, then that was the perfect opportunity to receive another lecture from Dean on keeping secrets. Considering his screw-up in going to Hell, talking to the Lucifer, and giving the archangel the opportunity to escape, he was not too keen on that option. Not if he had to face that silent recrimination in his brother’s eyes.
The coffee began to drip at first into the pot before becoming a steady brown stream which emanated heat and one of his favorite scents of all time.
The third option: do something-always the most dangerous option. This had more potential for screw-up than the do-nothing approach. If he told Dean, that was another argument waiting to happen. If he didn’t tell him and screwed up, well then he was back at option 2 again. Dean always said he wanted to know what was going on with him (how screwed up he was) but when it came down to it, he really didn’t.
“I mean look at our lives. How many more hits can we take? So if Sam says he’s good? Good.”
Option 3 did have a bit of a cheat. It was not like he could do anything right now-not without information. So he could research. He could read everything the Men of Letters had about dreams. It was not like they had not gone over what was known about Archangel’s powers over and over, adding their own information from their personal experiences. There was the African Dream Root (their go-to cure-all for anything supernaturally dream related). Surely the Men of Letters had a better way to control dreams-a way that even Archangel’s couldn’t get past. Maybe there was a simple solution that had no dire consequences that he did not have to tell Dean about.
So he could cheat and research dreams instead of getting nowhere with the Darkness. Dean didn’t ask many questions when he saw his brother’s head buried in a book. Besides, he was too busy doing his own ineffectual research and brooding about how to get Castiel back. Sam did not believe the Men of Letters had anything to say about two angels inhabiting the same vessel which had been personally reconstructed from being atomized on two separate occasions (at least). It was all pointless anyways if Castiel did not want to kick him out in the first place. If Dean did ask pointed questions, Sam could make up the excuse that maybe they could reach Cas via dream.
Did Angels dream?
Two for one then. It was making Option 3 sound even better.
~*~
“Sam.”
He gripped his hand, pressing against the palm of where a well-worn and deep scar remained as a lasting reminder of the time his madness had won. This sucky, crapfest of a life had finally beat him. He was an Olympian at pushing past the trauma and the personal shit by this point. Even before anything truly terrible happened he was a champion of evasion. At Stanford, he gave vague normal answers about his childhood. Even when Jess pressed for more information, trying to trip him up when he had drank a little too much, he never really gave away anything substantial.
Born in Kansas. Family moved around a lot. One brother, one dad, no mom.
Sometimes he had to add details to embellish, but Sam Winchester had become a pro at changing the subject.
So here he was, ignoring the hallucination once more. You’re just tired. He told himself.
“Sammy.”
He forced himself to look past the human image of Lucifer. He could take any form he wanted, but his brain seemed dead set on seeing him how he did that first time in his dream. A hand grasping his shoulder and then an unfamiliar voice as if it belonged there just as much as Jess did.
“You can pretend to ignore me all you want, but we both know I won. I will always win. You can cause and avert as many apocalypses as you want, but I will always be here. If not in your broken gourd, then in the Cage. And when you die-”
Sam Winchester snorted.
“When I die, I die this time. I get thrown into the Empty.”
“Interesting theory, but no.”
Sam went back to ignoring the hallucination.
“Do you really think some reaper gets to decide that? I get the dramatic death-wish. ‘Luci, I just can’t take the pain…’ but Sammy, how many times have you tried to die before? Dean won’t let you. Hell, I won’t let you.”
He forced himself not to shudder at that promise. This was all in his head. This was all his brain dealing with all his personal crap and centuries of torture. It was fine.
“I mean, think about it for a bit, Sammy. Gadreel-”
Sam’s eyes snapped towards the hallucination. This wasn’t right. Something wasn’t right here. Nothing was making sense.
“Gadreel was the biggest chump in all the universe--God’s most trusted.” Lucifer rolled his eyes and crossed his arms with a mocking shake of his head. “Was the biggest chump. Did you miss me that much, Sammy? Did you miss me so much that you had to get yourself possessed by an angel as stupid and pathetic as you are? You had to have known somehow, right? How else were you possessed? But Luci, you say. I was tricked!” He shook his head sadly. “I don’t think that’s going to hold up in court, buddy.”
He pressed harder on his hand-scar, but the image only flickered a little bit. The hallucination seemed a little affronted by the attempted banishing.
“Where was I? Oh yes, Gadreel was imprisoned since the dawn of time for being tricked by yours truly. What kind of punishment do you think you deserve for unleashing the literal, capital D, end of all light, matter, and goodness, DARKNESS?”
Sam closed his eyes and counted to ten. None of this made sense. He did not hallucinate like this-not anymore--not even under the worst fevers during the Trials. This could not be real.
“Do you really think you’re going to be let off that easy? Do you really think God, GOD who threw his favorite son into a cage, who imprisoned his own sister, old Testament wrathy big burrito G-O-D himself would let you just cease to exist? No Sam. Sammy, this ends the same way.”
Sam froze, eyes wide and he met his tormentor’s gaze directly. He shook his head in denial.
“This ends with you, in a box, tormented for all eternity.” He looked particularly smug and faux-hopeful. “With Amara or with me, who knows?”
He leaned in closer as if he had the secrets of the universe to tell.
“I hope it’s with me. I have so many new ideas.”
Without warning, the familiar began to dissolve around him. It disintegrated into dissilient spirals of darkness until he was encompassed completely by utter nothing. It was a cage of pure darkness. This time he shrieked for help, hating how weak he sounded. He called for Dean, for Castiel, for people long dead, and finally for God…but there was nothing and no one to answer.
~*~
Nothing.
He pushed the book away from him angrily, shaking his head with an eye-roll. The Men of Letters had thousands of pages of documents about dreaming. Personal experiments, research into lucid dreaming, dissertations on sleepwalking and narcolepsy, treatises on nightmares and REM. A three hundred page book written all by hand on lucid dreaming that looked a century old. Detailed and clinical lab notes on the effect of psychotropic drugs on dreams. A terrifying case study on five children who experienced sleep paralysis and saw the same horrifying monster reaching for them in their locked in bodies. Endless pages devoted to dream analysis: teeth falling out, falling, flying, showing up to work in your underwear. Did people in comas dream? Was there a connection between dreams and death? The Sandman: fact or fiction? They were well ahead of their time on the scientific side, but modern technology and research had already surpassed them. Every conclusion reached seemed to be along the same lines: dreams are a fascinating area of study which we fully do not understand at the moment. Further research is needed.
They knew about the African dream root. He had skimmed through a fifty page long-winded academic article if the amount of phosphorous in the soil Silene Capensis grew in affected the potency of the African dream root tea. Nothing new. Everything the Men of Letters had they already knew. His hopes had briefly raised when he found an old dusty file with a rough draft of a report. It was marked up and unfinished, covered in ink blotches, and hand corrected red ink with brutal comments from some sort of peer review process. Investigating the Connection Between Dreams and the Death-Glimpsing the Divine. None of it had been helpful, although it had brought up unpleasant memories of Heaven and Zachariah.
So he was back to what he already knew. African dream root. If it was Lucifer messing with him, he could take the gross tea and try to wrestle control of his dream from an archangel. Even if he had the practice-even if he was Freddy Krueger himself, he doubted he could do more than make Lucifer laugh at his attempts. It would amuse him for a second before he stomped him like a bug and reminded him just how weak Sam Winchester really was. Sam Winchester gave up the trials. Sam Winchester had no conviction. Sam Winchester screwed up everything he ever tried. Sam Winchester got Charlie killed and sacrificed the universe to save Dean from the Mark of Cain.
Option 2 then.
He rubbed at his eyes and glared at three days’ worth of wasted time, feeling a stab of guilt. That was time he could have spent trying to find Amara or save Cas. He glared at the hastily stapled papers from one of the more recent Men of Letters studies comparing the effects of different drugs on the sleep quality, dream retention, and the lucidity of the dreamer during conscious, semi-conscious, and unconscious activity. He admired the hand-drawn molecular drawings of the different molecules of the drugs. Magic mushrooms, peyote, LSD, heroin, THC, barbiturates, and on and on. He skimmed the paper once more for nothing better to do than to refuse giving up.
He let his mind wander a bit, wondering not for the first time what it would have been like if the Men of Letters had not been massacred by Abaddon. What would it be like growing up as a Legacy member? Would he have written something like this? Would he even shot a gun or stabbed a monster? Would he be like one of the many graduate students they had interviewed after some monster attack? Sometimes Sam found himself stuck on what he observed from their thought processes-how callous they could be sometimes in their curiosity, the questions they asked, that research mindset where they were looking for one answer but found another question.
No matter how hard he tried, he could not imagine his brother writing something like this.
He sighed again, flipping a page and asking a stupid question, maybe a question a Men of Letters or a graduate student might have asked.
If he could not wrest control of his dreams from an archangel, what would happen if he went in the opposite direction? What would happen if he destabilized his dreams altogether?
~*~
“Look at it.” Too blue eyes sneered down at the soul he held in his hands.
The pain was white hot at first, and then biting cold as if the very cold of space had been siphoned into his chest and left only crackling, ripping, tearing glassy breaks across the surface of his very being. Souls were like nuclear power plants for angels, and Sam Winchester’s was a nuclear reactor on the brink of a meltdown with that careless celestial hand pawing at it in the most indelicate way possible.
“Look at how ugly it is.”
Sam kept his eyes closed, not wanting to see what he meant by that. Memories came unbidden to his mind. There were only a few moments in his dark, twisted life as a hunter where he had been undone by something beautiful. When he thought he saw an angel for the first time; that pure bright light and the feeling of absolute peace and certainty. The utter tranquility of knowing that your faith (despite the darkness and death) was justified. Seeing his mother for the first time, young and alive. She was not just the blurred and smudged photograph brought out-a frozen moment that Sam would never be a part of. Even the angels falling as hundreds of meteors, almost like colorless fireworks as everything in his body failed. The world had narrowed to a point, surrounded by gray and black and encompassed by agony, but he remembered how the sky had lit up like the fourth of July. In a way, those moments did not compare to releasing Bobby’s soul from his arm during the second Trial. Maybe any source of light would have seemed incandescent after the dark stink of Hell and the muted nothing of Purgatory. Maybe it had been the trials themselves, their actions and completion seared into his consciousness without fading in the slightest. The human body was programmed to forget pain, but he could remember every exquisitely amazing and painful moment of that ultimate farce.
It didn’t matter, because even Dean had looked at the released soul with naked awe.
Souls were supposed to be beautiful. They were supposed to be this perfect unbreakable thing.
When his eyes were forced open he saw the abomination. Lucifer cocked his head as he stared at the glowing orb in his hand, his other hand left in Sam’s chest like a finger on a bookshelf. He had been yelled at as a kid by a librarian when he tried to re-shelve a book he had skimmed through. That was what his hand looked like, a place marker so he did not screw up putting his soul back. Still a glowing orb of light, his soul was dim and mucus-colored. The soft edges were sharp and bent as if the metaphysical had been beaten into solidity. Bleeding gashes marred the orb, oozing the pus-colored light that rotated like an unwilling planet trying to escape a black hole.
“I mean, at least it’s not black smoke, right?” Lucifer looked at him wryly, lips twitching into a fake concerned expression.
Sam was sure souls were not supposed to smell, but the taste of rotting corpses and burning flesh was so overwhelming he had to fight the urge to vomit all over himself.
“Not even I could make your soul that disgusting. And they call me the monster! It just figures. You ever think that God wanted you to jump in the Cage? I originally thought you were made for me-my true vessel--but maybe God made you so repulsive to torture even me… That makes you think, doesn’t it? It’s not enough that you’re some hunter freak with demon blood, but you’re a smug self-righteous son of a bitch too. You know what the first and greatest of man’s sins are, Sammy? I do.”
Lucifer toyed with the soul in his hand, but his face twitched with disgust as if the thing were cold and slimy.
“It’s Pride. You thought you were so special. You thought God would send you visions after your colossal screw-up. I mean, just imagine it! Imagine my Father asking me to bow down before someone like you. Is it really so hard to imagine why I rebelled?”
His fingers twitched inside of Sam’s chest, and the putrescent soul seemed to sag and deflate.
“Dad liked the pretty things. That’s why he made the angels first. He had to be in a special mood to make a monster. I guess there’s the real question, the one you can’t quite stop thinking about. Even I’m curious. Did Dad make your soul that ugly, or did you do it yourself? Free-will and all. It’s enough to give you a headache.”
He scowled at the ugly soul and its wisp of light. It really was worthless.
“Nothing to say?” He shrugged. “Well, can’t say I didn’t try to be nice…”
He squeezed, and Sam Winchester exploded into a rain of blood and guts for Dean to find.
~*~
“Dude, what the hell.” Dean Winchester looked blankly at his brother and the paraphernalia that was neatly spread before him.
He recognized a few things, and the smell of the African dream root tea was unmistakable. The meticulous nature of the panoply of ingredients belied just how random that selection seemed. Narrowed eyes passed over the table in confusion and suspicion as if it were another spread of lollipops, candy, cheetos, and a plate of marshmallow nachos. Except, this time, instead of foods he actually might eat (and hey maybe those marshmallow nachos might taste good) there were flowers, cinnamon, a kettle of water, a bottle of whiskey, some weird potato looking thing, random bottles of spices that looked recently purchased, and were those mushrooms?
“Um…”
Yes, the classic Sam Winchester response when he was caught in the act of doing something that could qualify as stupid.
He looked freaked.
“I swear to God Sammy, if this is another ‘release an ancient evil on accident’…thing I’m gonna…are those mushrooms?!”
He still could not get over the mushrooms.
“Uh, yeah.” He inched slightly towards the meticulously set up table, trying to block the visual with his body.
At least from what he had seen, none of the ingredients had looked witchy. No bones. No random animal parts. No weird carved stones. No weird markings. No evil looking books.
“I am too tried to stand here pulling teeth. Dude, just spit it out.” Dean pinched the bridge of his nose. He understood the African dream root tea, but why the extra ingredients?
Whether by conscious choice or not, his brother adopted a completely innocent expression followed by a sheepish smile and then a shake of his head.
“Well, I haven’t been sleeping well.”
“Dude, you never sleep well.”
“Um yeah, I just…”
“With Lucifer riding Cas and Amara…I mean we have our plate full. No one’s sleeping well.” He pointed out.
“It’s sort of an experiment.”
Sam was now trying the tactic of flooding Dean with so much information, talking super-fast and in big words that were probably not real. Dean tried to follow along at first, interrupt second, but then waited it out with eyes that screamed he was so done with this. Still, despite this overload of clearly useless information he needed one question answered.
“Why the mushrooms?”
“Um…”
Sam Winchester actually looked embarrassed. Not even being publicly groped by older women had created that particular expression over his face. He looked like a teenager briefly, which was a feat in itself. Dean’s eyes scanned the table again: the African dream root, the makings of a tea, the spices to cut the flavor, and mushrooms. Then it clicked in his head.
“Magic mushrooms?!”
“Um…”
“So you’re going to trip balls in your sleep. Is that your plan?”
“This study from John Hopkins states that they can have positive long lasting effects on your mental health and they’re relatively harmless.”
“What universe did I step into!?”
They both knew this argument could go round and around until they were sick of each other. The cat was already out of the bag, so to speak. They were both too sleep deprived and stressed to go ten rounds of dodging, evading, and accusing.
“They’re not just bad dreams, Dean. You remember when I thought God was sending me visions…”
“Yeah, and I told you-”
Sam held up his hand and cut his brother off.
“It was Lucifer. I know. That’s the point.”
“What?” He sounded exasperated.
“He’s messed with my dreams before. He’s messed with my head before. I…I’m not sure if…”
“If what?”
“If he’s still doing it. If he’s in my dreams.”
Dean looked like he was about to form the next argument, the next attack, the next reason why this was all so incredibly stupid. He stopped though. His mouth opened and then closed, and he looked down. He actually glared at the floor, ran a hand through his short spiky hair and then looked up at his clearly sleep-deprived, desperate brother.
“Sammy…” It was all that needed to be said, or at least all he really could say. It was all right. Sam knew what he meant.
Neither one of them wanted to bring up how messed up he had been after Castiel broke the wall in his head. Dean could not handle Lucifer, the loss of Castiel, the Darkness, and a messed-up brother on his own. He just couldn’t.
“Look, I know it’s crazy and…I don’t know what will happen. I just…need to know.”
“So you want to take ‘shrooms. What is this, college?”
“Dean-”
“No, I get it. You want to have tea with Puff the Magic Dragon and the friggin’ Mad Hatter in Wonderland.”
“…what?!”
“Fine.”
Sam blinked in absolute confusion and maybe a touch of horror. What the hell was happening? Was this a dream too?
“If you’re gonna trip balls in La-la land, then I’m coming with you.”