In His Image: Elect
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In which Sam seeks advice from someone Dean really wouldn’t approve of.
Sam, Lucifer.
elect [v] to make deliberate choice of (a course of action, an opinion, etc.) in preference to an alternative; to choose (a person) for an office or position of any kind. [adj] Picked out, chosen, also, chosen for excellence or by preference; Theol. Chosen by God, especially for salvation. Opposed to reprobate.
Present day.
“Sam. It’s good to see you.”
Sam raised his head. It was close to an hour since he’d fallen asleep, so far as he could tell. He’d almost stopped waiting.
The devil looked tired. His eyes were drawn and sad, older than imagination and showing the weight of years in a way no angel should. When he inclined his head the movement looked a little slower and less graceful than usual.
“Lucifer.” Sam stood up, feeling unexpectedly clumsy and awkward. He’d had a speech planned, something angry and clever, but it suddenly seemed rather childish before the archangel’s quiet courtesy. This time Lucifer was a guest, not an intruder.
What he found himself saying instead was, “D’you want to sit down?”
Lucifer’s eyebrows arched in something that looked like mild puzzlement.
Smooth, Sam, smooth.
Sam flapped a hand at him. “It’s just you’re looking kind of beat there.”
Lucifer raised his left hand and trailed the tips of his fingers delicately over his forehead, his eyes, the shaggy stubble on his cheeks, with distant curiosity, as if he’d forgotten his face was there. “Sitting won’t refresh me, Sam.”
Nick’s skin was unblemished here. Sam wasn’t sure exactly how the projection of angels that you could see in dreams related to their real selves, or to their vessels, but either Lucifer hadn’t really noticed how Nick was breaking down, or he had just enough vanity to gloss it over. Which was... interesting.
Sam sank back down onto the green park bench, which was, for some reason, sitting at the side of a long winding dirt road on a steep wooded mountainside. “It’s just something we do. Humans. If someone looks tired you offer them rest, to show that you care.”
Damn, he’d been spending too much time around Castiel. He was developing an explain-the-puzzling-ways-of-mortals reflex.
It was very difficult, when he was there, to think of Lucifer as the enemy. Especially when he was looking at Sam like that, all precisely focussed weight with just a hint of surprised warmth behind it, as if Sam was the centre and meaning of his world.
Or, you know, his favourite tux.
Sam hadn’t expected him to pad barefoot over to the bench and actually sit down. One long leg folded under him, so that he could sit side on with Nick’s soft hands folded in his lap and all his attention on Sam.
“You let the wall down.”
“What wall?”
“The wall keeping me out of your dreams.” Lucifer’s voice was a low rumble, the drag and scrape of it more familiar and steadying than it ought to be. Considering what he had done and meant to do. “I didn’t expect you would call me.”
So Lucifer had not been keeping his distance on purpose, after all. Lucifer had been blocked by someone, or something. Not the Enochian sigils on their ribs, and probably not anything else Castiel had done. Sam had his suspicions that Castiel had been soothing the worst of Dean’s nightmares of Hell, but that was a different proposition altogether to barring a door against the brightest of archangels. And Castiel would probably have mentioned it, if he’d done anything else after the sigils.
Sam was better at poker than Dean. He let Lucifer’s inference stand without a flicker, as if he had dismantled this wall himself for the purpose of this conversation. “I need your help. Will you give it, even if I don’t promise you a ‘yes’ for it?”
“Of course.” The immediate response, low and completely honest, almost threw Sam, almost diverted him into asking why. But he knew why, had counted on it, and that conversation wouldn’t go anywhere helpful.
So far as it went, when it came to Sam, Lucifer seemed to be entirely sincere.
“Okay.” He breathed out, glanced out over the rough green carpet of pines falling away below them in muffled folds, and looked back. “Okay. You can hear me when I pray to you, yes? Can any angel, if I pray just to them?”
“Certainly.”
“And you can’t come to me when I’m awake unless I tell you where I am, but you can visit my dreams.” It wasn’t really a question, and he didn’t wait for Lucifer’s nod before he went on, “How difficult is it for you guys? Entering people’s dreams?”
Lucifer’s head tipped lazily sideways. He still hadn’t blinked. “Almost effortless.”
“And what about...” There really wasn’t any way to ask this without showing his hand, but Lucifer almost certainly knew about Castiel anyway. Possibly more than they did. “What about an angel who was weak, or hurt? Too weak to actually fly?”
Lucifer’s eyes tightened a little, a glimpse just for a moment of something fragile and weary behind the grey steel.
“He would be a shadow of an angel if he couldn’t hear a prayer. But I doubt my little brother has the strength to answer it himself, even in a dream.”
Sam had almost expected it, but he felt the kick of disappointment in his gut all the same. “Okay. Is there any other way I could talk to him? If he’s... well, still around?”
Lucifer’s voice was quiet and flat. “There is a simple summoning ritual that you could perhaps manage in your sleep, if you’ve the ingredients in the room. It has no more force to compel than a prayer, but if the angel decides to answer the power to do so comes from the ritual, not from the angel.”
Sam laughed softly, without amusement. “Don’t trust me with compulsion?”
Lucifer looked at him with distant grey eyes, old and resigned. “Should I, Sam? Should I really?”
Sam’s eyes slid away, a strange regret flickering by. Because of course Lucifer shouldn’t. If he and Dean had the means to compel him and kill him, it would be done without a second thought. This strange, delicate truce assumed that Lucifer wouldn’t, and that Sam couldn’t.
Of all the things they’d ever hunted, this was the oldest, the deepest, the most powerful. This still, quiet creature with eyes like faded stars was, perhaps not the father, but certainly the centre, of everything they’d fought against all their lives. But he was also, in some strange way, the most beautiful, with an incomprehensible brightness that Sam could almost feel, just on the edge of perception. Less than thirty hours before Sam had seen him tear apart gods with his bare hands, barely bothering to snarl in his cold, absolute fury. But he didn’t feel evil. There was something about Lucifer that was oddly... pure. Not quite naïve, though it felt like that sometimes. Just as if he didn’t need all the viciousness and the corruption that everyone else needed to do terrible things. Knowing he was right. Not a zealot, but what comes before the zealot: the cause, maybe?
People turned into monsters for causes. But then, causes never actually took a knife to people and worlds themselves.
It should have disturbed Sam more than it did that he found Lucifer so easy to understand.
“You didn’t have to kill those gods,” he said to the distant blue mountains.
Or Gabriel. If he had. But the chances that he’d left Gabriel alive were slim to none, and Lucifer’s reaction to that name was too unguessable for Sam to risk while there was a chance for Castiel.
Lucifer’s growl smouldered at the edges. “They were holding you.”
As if that explained everything. Maybe it did.
A very important tux, then.
“I don’t think they would have hurt us,” Sam hedged, without conviction.
“No one can hurt you, Sam.” Low and dangerous, and a very simple statement of the way the world would be. “If they did, I would find them. And I would fix you.”
Sam couldn’t help the shudder that scraped out of him. Everything with Lucifer was so big, so absolute and cosmic, devotion and fury and reality. Because Lucifer didn’t lie. He just set reality aside for his own version. And Sam understood, he did, and it was seductive and overwhelming. But that wasn’t the way humanity worked.
For some reason, Sam’s own voice echoed in his head, something he’d said over a year ago, babbling anything he could think of to keep the rugaru from ripping Dean’s throat out before Sam could jimmy the closet door. You don’t have to be a monster. It doesn’t matter what you are, it only matters what you do. It’s your choice.
Jack Montgomery had been past listening, at the time. So had Sam.
He looked back at Lucifer, at the careful way he held his body as if he was always on the edge of burning the world down around him. At the stubble paused forever halfway to a beard, never to change again, every cell in Nick’s body frozen and immortalised. At the faint, sideways shadow of arching wings that Sam could almost see dwarfing the trees behind him.
Sam reached out and touched his knee, gentle and firm. The texture of the faded denim was oddly vivid under his fingers. “You can’t just fix us, Lucifer. That isn’t how the world works.”
“And we will fix that together.” Immediate and quietly fierce, and not understanding. Perhaps incapable of it.
Sam studied him, perhaps for the first time, this strange, ancient creature without a family, deity of demons, with his white-hot tenderness and his gentleman’s manners, committing genocide because of love. He could feel him, he realised, feel a faint thread of what he was, a tenuous connection to the vast, impossible thing inside Nick’s body. He could feel the sense in which he himself belonged to Lucifer, had done since he was born.
It was a revelation. This was what Lucifer meant: this was why, to the angels, it was inevitable that Sam would agree. There was a faint tug, the possibility of fitting together and losing the rough edges between them. Sam prodded at it. To a part of him, to a part of Lucifer, it was meant to be.
But that was only one part.
It was an odd thing to actually feel that thread, that little piece of destiny, to feel it as a finite thing rather than a tunnel looming inevitably ahead on the road.
In a sense he belonged to Lucifer. But there were other senses. He belonged to Dean, to Bobby. To Castiel, perhaps, if he was alive. He had chosen not to belong to his father. He belonged to the job that he’d assigned himself in the world. He definitely belonged to himself. And he belonged to anyone and anything else he chose, for as long as he chose.
Huh.
Try getting an angel to see that, of course.
The angel in question was looking at him with a faint frown, questioning, as if Sam was the one thing in the universe not completely laid open to his understanding in every detail and he found it mildly exasperating.
Sam grinned at the devil, grinned as his eyebrows rose and he murmured “Sam,” patient and faintly ironic. He could choose Lucifer, he realised. Hell, he could love him, all the world in him, he could lose himself in him and find it ecstatic. It wasn’t honestly like he had any moral high ground over him. But humanity wasn’t absolute, wasn’t about choosing one thing for all time and then never choosing again.
If angels, for all their rigidity, could change - if Castiel could choose Earth over Heaven and Hell, and an archangel could choose to run and choose to return and take a stand - Sam was not made of stone. And today was just one day.
Sam leaned forward, shifting his weight onto the hand still on Lucifer’s knee, and raised the other to cradle the back of his skull, sliding through dirty blond hair. He tilted his head, slowly enough that the angel could move away, and he smiled.
“No.”
Lucifer blinked.
Sam kissed an archangel in the moment between one breath and the next, caught his mouth and kept it. It was hot and startled and open, and Sam pressed in and caught his lower lip. Sam was completely unsurprised to find that their mouths fit perfectly.
For a moment, Lucifer was very still, forgetting to remember to breathe, his knee like marble under Sam’s hand but his mouth soft, shockingly human. Then a large, warm hand wrapped itself around Sam’s hip, not tugging, just carefully pressing, and he growled low and hungry into Sam’s mouth.
Sam swallowed the growl, and the little startled hitch in it that came when he rubbed his thumb over a rough cheek, as if Lucifer was surprised at the luscious slide of tongue and lips, the drag of stubble and skin. Sam could feel the depth of him, just there on the edge of comprehension, like looking out over the sea in summer and knowing in your marrow just how much water lay under the still blue surface. He cradled it, tender in his own way, not pushing, because this was where he was stronger. This was perhaps the only way he could hurt the devil, and the only way it wouldn’t be fair.
No promises, because there was more than one choice and more than one way to live, and time to change.
Lucifer’s fingers flexed against his hip, carefully. It was the same hip Gabriel had held, but without the demon blood screaming inside him there was no burn, no illusory fracturing against the angel’s touch. Sam could feel the brutal strength that trembled below the skin, but Lucifer didn’t grip even hard enough to bruise. He pressed soft heat into the corner of Sam’s mouth and drew back, his eyes unreadable.
Sam waited, his heart thudding deep and warm in his chest, counting the seconds of a finite life.
“I expected you to be... smaller,” the devil said slowly.
Sam seriously doubted that was a crack about his height.
“Me, or humanity?”
Lucifer’s eyes narrowed, voice rough with scorn for a moment. “Humanity is an anthill. You are...” He tilted his head, as if trying to find just the right angle to look into the deepest part of Sam. “...something different.”
And after five years of demon blood and Boy King and broken seals and treachery, face to the face with the fallen angel who might just be some kind of soul mate, it was suddenly that easy for Sam to laugh and say, “I’m really not.”
Lucifer raised his hand and touched the skin of Sam’s throat, gently. His thumb hovered over the fragile, functional curve of his collarbone with proprietary fascination, and with reverence.
“You will say yes, Sam.”
“Not today.”
“You want this.” There was the faintest trace of a puzzlement in the deep rumble of his voice. “You can feel it.”
Sam chuckled low, breath snagging under Lucifer’s fingers as they traced delicately up his throat. “Humans can want more than one thing, Lucifer. We can choose.”
Lucifer caught Sam’s jaw and arched an eyebrow, looking singularly unimpressed. Sam raised his eyebrows back at him and shook his head a little, unable to stop the stupid smug grin that kept taking over his mouth, and Lucifer drew him slowly and purposefully back into a kiss.
It went on a little longer this time, slower and lazier. No promises or demands, no particular direction, just a press of pleasure and challenge, shared.
It did occur to Sam that Lucifer would be a very focussed lover, but there was no way in Heaven or Hell he was going that far. He drew two fingers curiously around inside the arch of one long bare foot that touched the inside of his own knee, and made an angel tremble.
When Sam eventually drew back, Lucifer made a noise, just faint enough that it might not have been there at all. He had closed his eyes. There was a faint tracery of blue veins on Nick’s eyelids. It looked tentative, fragile, and very human.
Sam tapped his knee. “So, ritual. Enochian or Latin?”
Lucifer’s eyes opened slowly, and the illusion of vulnerability turned to pale marble. His voice was a little deeper and a little rougher than usual, but disdain still rolled in every syllable. “Considerably older than the Roman Empire, Sam. In any of its incarnations.” He held out a single leaf of paper between two fingers. It was covered in writing, Enochian ritual and English instructions, in stark black majuscules that were upright, elegant, and absolutely controlled.
Sam folded it carefully, twice, and slipped it into his coat pocket. Then he looked up into clear, inhuman eyes. He got the impression that Lucifer would not appreciate effusiveness, or vague promises of conditional amity. Or, you know, requests that he stop trying to destroy the world. So he went for direct and honest, and limited. “Thank you.”
Lucifer nodded, once. “I’ll see you in Detroit.”
Detroit.
“Yeah, I guess.”
The archangel unfolded his limbs from the bench and stood, grass curling reverently around his bare feet. He looked out over the dream valleys below, mile upon mile of pine forest with no touch of human civilisation save the road at their feet.
“Sam.”
Sam leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and made a questioning noise.
Lucifer looked down at him. His face was impassive, but something about his eyes made Sam ache. “If you do find him. Take care of him.”
There was a weight in his voice that made Sam think he wasn’t talking about Castiel, or not entirely, but he couldn’t quite place the significance. It wasn’t as if Lucifer was short of little brothers, after all, and there wasn’t really any reason why Castiel should be special to him. After a moment, he nodded.
“You too, if things go your way.”
“I will.”
Solemn as a vow.
Lucifer’s gaze slid away, weary and weighted, gathering himself to leave.
Grief. The word slipped into Sam’s head unexpectedly, obvious after the fact. He wasn’t sure why it hadn’t occurred to him earlier, except that he still wasn’t used to thinking of angels like that, in such simple, human terms. But then, in many ways angels were perfectly simple, far more so than the complexities of the human soul.
“Lucifer.”
Because he had to know.
The line of Nick’s shoulders was coiled and alert, as if invisible wings were poised to catch the breeze. He didn’t look back at Sam, but didn’t move.
Sam chanced it.
“Are there only three archangels left now?”
The world went suddenly very silent. Birds, insects, breeze, the sound of Sam’s heel on the stones underfoot, were smothered under a stifling silence.
The harsh shape of Lucifer’s body against the sky did not move or change, but he felt vaster than the mountains, heavier, and millennia colder.
Sam closed his hand over the precious paper in his coat, and waited. Seconds ticked by.
When the angel finally spoke, his tone was soft, but the shrill, white edge of his true voice sawed at Nick’s throat. “Chamael and Yrihel are lost in humanity. Gabriel and Azrael are dead. Raphael is a broken toy.”
Just me and him, he didn’t need to say. The end of a family.
Sam exhaled, and looked down at his feet. Causes. Lucifer could honestly regret the death of the brother he had killed, the last of six not quite lost to him, because he believed it had to be done. That he had had no choice. Sam thought of Gabriel, all sharp edges and sharp tongue and bright eyes, facing down Lucifer’s cold grey steel and immovable truths, and he felt a sudden surge of hot anger. At both of them.
He chose to swallow it.
“I’m sorry.”
After a moment of stillness, Lucifer vanished, stirring the air faintly in his wake.
---
Sam was back in the motel by three in the morning. Dean was sound asleep, his fingers curled loose and soft next to the pillow, and the note Sam had left was undisturbed. Sam changed silently into sleep pants in the bathroom, then flushed the note before padding back to bed.
He hid the paper from Lucifer in the CD drawer of his laptop.
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