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blue_bells» Title: Four-by-Four
» Fandom: Supernatural
» Warnings: Incest, 6x03 spoilers
» Pairing(s)/Characters: Lucifer/Sam/Adam/Michael
» Summary: Wherein Michael and Lucifer orchestrate unorthodox ways to escape the cage, Sam battles to stay lucid and Adam ignores them all.
» A/N: This is what happens when I'm left to amuse myself in airport lounges on four hours of sleep (ETA: now updated after sleep). I'm erring on the side of caution with this rating.
The cage is a four-by-four cell of stone walls and dirt floors.
There’s a desert outside pushing its arid heat into their confined space and Sam is slouched in the furthest corner to hide his face from the bright glare of the not-sun streaming in through the cell’s only window.
His bare shoulder drags against the stone, even and cold, while the sun beats onto his chest. He picks at the thin, sleeveless cotton he's found himself in. It's damp with sweat and creased with dirt. When he pulls up one of his knees, he can feel the pattern of pebbles and fine, fine dirt through his pants. He thinks they might be khaki.
A shadow falls over his face and he drops the arm over his eyes.
Lucifer’s arms hang by his sides and Sam squints against his silhouette that still looks like Nick. Lucifer will always look like Nick to him, curling around the edges like a thing of smoke and flickering heat.
Sam's forgotten the notion of speech in the cage. They watch each other and the air is still, but for the hiss of the desert sun through the window.
And then Lucifer's across the cage, hands leaning against the stone sill as he stares out, features bright and hardened in the light.
Sam watches him in a half-conscious, semi-aware state and it feels like days later, but it could be years or minutes when he recognises that Lucifer's gone and he's somehow migrated to the shade of the wall under the sill.
One day, Adam is there leaning against the adjacent stone, his arms propped on his knees.
His expression is slack as he stares ahead at the opposite wall. Dust and sand fall through the light before his face, but he never blinks. He never swallows, sighs or takes his eyes off that wall and Sam wonders what he’s seeing.
If he knows Sam is there, he’s more interested in that long, thin crack that runs from the ceiling to the soil.
Out of sight and Adam must push him far enough out of mind, because Adam is suddenly not there one day and Sam scrapes symbols in the dirt and sand with the heel of his boot. He doesn't remember what they mean and they disappear when he tries to give them names.
Sometimes, he's alone in the cage.
He presses his head up against the window’s bars, rubs his forehead down and steel feels just like he remembers. The hot, dry air almost burns when he sucks in a deep breath, though he knows it’s not air at all. Sam hangs his arms between the bars and the sun feels harsh enough to blister, but when he looks up, the entire sky looks like one sun, not a single fleck of blue in its breadth.
The sand dunes change, piling higher and falling away like mountains in motion when he's not looking. For some reason, he thinks he should hear cicadas, camels, or the bells and calls of travelling caravans, but this isn't the Sahara; it's Hell.
The hiss of the desert sharpens into a bright, curdling scream and a hand claps down on his shoulder, pulling him away from the window.
Lucifer's gaze is heavy, bright blue eyes narrowed.
"Don't stand near the bars."
They’re the first words Sam's heard in Hell, but it's not enough for him to break his silence. He doesn't remember how yet.
Lucifer looks over his shoulder and shimmers away like an afterthought.
Michael stands, arms crossed before the opposite wall and it’s Adam, but Sam’s learned his tell: Adam’s features come alive. Today he’s stern, but amused.
There’s a curl to his mouth – a sneer Sam only saw in Adam when they sat at opposite ends of Bobby’s table and Adam called Sam on his attempt to bond over a distant father. It’s that same look Michael wears on Adam’s face, like he’s calculating Sam’s chances against him whilst calling Sam’s bullshit for considering he would ever stand a chance.
Sam has no actual desire for a confrontation.
Lucifer rematerialises beside his shoulder in a moment and the angels exchange a long stare.
Sam’s gotten used to that.
He turns back to the window when he thinks he hears crickets.
It goes on like this: long stares and silence as Michael and Lucifer circle each other, Lucifer draws Sam away from the bars and Sam waits for Adam to acknowledge him. Sam hopes there’s something of Adam left and he’s been watching more than a shell of his brother when in vacancy.
One day Sam settles himself in direct obstruction of Adam’s view of the wall.
“Hey,” Sam tries and if he’d been aboveground he might have expected his voice to be rough from so long without use, but this is the cage and the same rules don’t apply.
Adam stares at a spot somewhere on Sam’s chin like he’s staring through him.
It’s disappointing. Sam sighs quietly, palming a line from his thigh to his knee, but when he looks up, Adam’s gaze is tracking the slow motion of his hands. It’s the first reaction Sam’s had and, initially, he thinks it’s Michael.
Adam meets his eyes, blinks once and his voice is hollow. Human.
“You’re not my brother,” He says. “I don’t have any brothers.”
The next time Sam sees someone in the cage, both Michael and Lucifer are standing by the window and there’s a strange sound like the hush of a thousand voices in query as they murmur to each other. It tingles along Sam’s skin like the first breeze he’s felt in a hundred years.
Lucifer’s wrapped a hand around one of the bars and Michael’s arms are folded over his chest again.
Sam knows he should be concerned.
Especially when they both turn to look at him like that.
But he can’t bring himself to care. None of them are going anywhere and the world is safe while that’s true.
He expects an ambush, for the other shoe to drop like a boot between his shoulders, forcing his face down into the dirt, but the twist comes not as he expects.
He’s tried to count the days with marks in the dirt, or notches in the wall, but the light never changes and his marks disappear.
Sam’s hovering in his favoured corner again and the angels are back.
Michael looks in all respects like Adam, sitting with his back against the wall, elbows on his knees again. Lucifer is stooped before him on his haunches, head cocked as he murmurs in that voice of soft concern that does strange things to Sam’s sense of reality.
There’s a smirk on Michael’s face before he kicks the cloud of dirt in Lucifer’s face.
Sam hears the curse. Lucifer is flattened on his back and Michael crawls over him, weight on the devil’s thighs as he crushes him back into the dirt with a long, hungry kiss and Sam sees Lucifer’s shoulders slacken before he reaches for the hands pushing through his clothes and –
Sam has to stop watching.
But the moment he shuts his eyes, he feels the hands in his hair, the rolling weight against his hips and he realises that he’s the one on his back in the dirt moaning through a kiss that’s leaving him completely open for Adam to suck on his tongue and trail teeth over his lower lip.
Adam?
Sam shakes the dirt from his eyes, pushing Adam back with a wet sound as he shoves himself up to his elbows. Adam’s harsh exhale breathes into his mouth, but when his eyes open, they’re blue and clear and human.
It doesn’t make sense and judging by the way Adam searches his face, the question must be clear, but he doesn’t wait for Sam’s answer and just curls his hands tighter in the thin shirt. When Adam’s next kiss tips his head back, Sam feels Lucifer surge with the groan in his throat before the hands on Adam’s hips dig enough to bruise and the next time Sam looks, Adam’s face clouds with Michael.
Sam understands now that he was never completely alone in the cage.
He can’t tell if it’s Adam or the angel that pushes a hand down between them. Adam’s jacket is still caught around his elbows when he rolls against Sam with them both in his hand. He bucks in surprise, the thighs around his hips clench before Adam can tip backwards and Sam thinks Lucifer has a hand in strangling his flute of urgent, desperate noise.
There’s nothing familiar or sensible about this: it’s Adam, and Michael, and Lucifer, and when Sam knew it was ‘them against us’, this was not what he expected. He neither pegged Michael to start anything like this, or for Adam to concede.
If he did.
“Adam – Adam wait,” Sam says.
He manages to push himself into a seated position, groaning through the pleasure of that terrible judgment call when Adam winds himself further into Sam’s lap and leans bodily against him through the next thrust.
“Come on, Sam,” Adam says, twisting upward slide of his hand and Sam’s arms nearly give out, “Or are you going to leave me out here on my own again?”
It’s a cheap shot, but it’s enough to derail Sam’s brain from the slickness of Adam’s hand to the honest resentment of that question.
Adam was the one left behind every time it mattered to be a Winchester. He was secondary, they all knew it and though it was honestly unintended, Sam’s working his throat to form an apology when Adam’s forehead pushes against his.
“You’re not my brother, Sam,” He says, not in the ways it counts, like that’s any reason not to be sorry. He’s stopped rocking against Sam, but he abruptly shudders, wincing softly and the aborted noise in his throat leaves Sam wondering just what Michael’s doing to him.
When Adam’s eyes slit open again, his pupils are blown wide. It’s a bolt of lust straight to Sam’s groin and he’s already grasping Adam closer with hands under his thighs, when the words are growled against his lips.
“So, stop acting like it.”
There’s a rumble of approval in his chest when Sam tilts into the next kiss, tearing Adam free of his jacket, and he can’t tell if the triumph is his or Lucifer’s because in the next moment there’s a new and very insistent pull from within his chest that is definitely none of them.
Sam startles when he feels it again, the pull away and up that numbs his arms. He looks over his shoulder and sees nothing there.
Adam’s face is careful, but Lucifer is laughing and Sam has a feeling that he had expected this.
“What’s going on?” Sam asks, not really expecting an answer.
One of the universal truths: He would never let us join, Lucifer says, but it’s angry despite the triumph and Sam still doesn’t know how he’s won.
A fracture of light veins the ceiling at the next pull, almost bowing Sam with its power, and he finally thinks he understands what’s happening.
Adam’s hands have come to rest at Sam’s elbows. Sam feels the tremor of his chuckle, but the familiar resignation in his face makes Sam sick.
“I guess it worked,” Adam says.
Sam tightens his hold and Adam doesn’t protest, but he doesn’t help Sam either.
“You’re coming with me,” Sam says.
“Sure,” Adam shrugs with an unconvincing smile, “I’ll be right behind you.”
The final pull is a vicious wrench and Lucifer is torn from him like a hook ripped through his side, raw and without preamble.
But when Sam surfaces alone from the graveyard breathing real air and all the smells of the forest at night, Dean’s not there; there’s no suited angel to explain why he just left his younger brother at the mercy of two sociopathic archangels and he almost goes mad in the first three months.
So, when Dean asks him a year later why he’s not crippled with the trauma of his time in the cage, he thinks of Adam, of Lucifer’s strange vigil over him and he can answer honestly.
It could have been much, much worse.
He remembers how the ceiling of the cage had fractured and considers that maybe Adam had been telling the truth, whether he realised it or not at the time.
The door was broken open for Sam.
If they were lucky, maybe Adam wasn’t far behind, after all.
» Fandom: Supernatural
» Warnings: Incest, 6x03 spoilers
» Pairing(s)/Characters: Lucifer/Sam/Adam/Michael
» Summary: Wherein Michael and Lucifer orchestrate unorthodox ways to escape the cage, Sam battles to stay lucid and Adam ignores them all.
» A/N: This is what happens when I'm left to amuse myself in airport lounges on four hours of sleep (ETA: now updated after sleep). I'm erring on the side of caution with this rating.
The cage is a four-by-four cell of stone walls and dirt floors.
There’s a desert outside pushing its arid heat into their confined space and Sam is slouched in the furthest corner to hide his face from the bright glare of the not-sun streaming in through the cell’s only window.
His bare shoulder drags against the stone, even and cold, while the sun beats onto his chest. He picks at the thin, sleeveless cotton he's found himself in. It's damp with sweat and creased with dirt. When he pulls up one of his knees, he can feel the pattern of pebbles and fine, fine dirt through his pants. He thinks they might be khaki.
A shadow falls over his face and he drops the arm over his eyes.
Lucifer’s arms hang by his sides and Sam squints against his silhouette that still looks like Nick. Lucifer will always look like Nick to him, curling around the edges like a thing of smoke and flickering heat.
Sam's forgotten the notion of speech in the cage. They watch each other and the air is still, but for the hiss of the desert sun through the window.
And then Lucifer's across the cage, hands leaning against the stone sill as he stares out, features bright and hardened in the light.
Sam watches him in a half-conscious, semi-aware state and it feels like days later, but it could be years or minutes when he recognises that Lucifer's gone and he's somehow migrated to the shade of the wall under the sill.
One day, Adam is there leaning against the adjacent stone, his arms propped on his knees.
His expression is slack as he stares ahead at the opposite wall. Dust and sand fall through the light before his face, but he never blinks. He never swallows, sighs or takes his eyes off that wall and Sam wonders what he’s seeing.
If he knows Sam is there, he’s more interested in that long, thin crack that runs from the ceiling to the soil.
Out of sight and Adam must push him far enough out of mind, because Adam is suddenly not there one day and Sam scrapes symbols in the dirt and sand with the heel of his boot. He doesn't remember what they mean and they disappear when he tries to give them names.
Sometimes, he's alone in the cage.
He presses his head up against the window’s bars, rubs his forehead down and steel feels just like he remembers. The hot, dry air almost burns when he sucks in a deep breath, though he knows it’s not air at all. Sam hangs his arms between the bars and the sun feels harsh enough to blister, but when he looks up, the entire sky looks like one sun, not a single fleck of blue in its breadth.
The sand dunes change, piling higher and falling away like mountains in motion when he's not looking. For some reason, he thinks he should hear cicadas, camels, or the bells and calls of travelling caravans, but this isn't the Sahara; it's Hell.
The hiss of the desert sharpens into a bright, curdling scream and a hand claps down on his shoulder, pulling him away from the window.
Lucifer's gaze is heavy, bright blue eyes narrowed.
"Don't stand near the bars."
They’re the first words Sam's heard in Hell, but it's not enough for him to break his silence. He doesn't remember how yet.
Lucifer looks over his shoulder and shimmers away like an afterthought.
Michael stands, arms crossed before the opposite wall and it’s Adam, but Sam’s learned his tell: Adam’s features come alive. Today he’s stern, but amused.
There’s a curl to his mouth – a sneer Sam only saw in Adam when they sat at opposite ends of Bobby’s table and Adam called Sam on his attempt to bond over a distant father. It’s that same look Michael wears on Adam’s face, like he’s calculating Sam’s chances against him whilst calling Sam’s bullshit for considering he would ever stand a chance.
Sam has no actual desire for a confrontation.
Lucifer rematerialises beside his shoulder in a moment and the angels exchange a long stare.
Sam’s gotten used to that.
He turns back to the window when he thinks he hears crickets.
It goes on like this: long stares and silence as Michael and Lucifer circle each other, Lucifer draws Sam away from the bars and Sam waits for Adam to acknowledge him. Sam hopes there’s something of Adam left and he’s been watching more than a shell of his brother when in vacancy.
One day Sam settles himself in direct obstruction of Adam’s view of the wall.
“Hey,” Sam tries and if he’d been aboveground he might have expected his voice to be rough from so long without use, but this is the cage and the same rules don’t apply.
Adam stares at a spot somewhere on Sam’s chin like he’s staring through him.
It’s disappointing. Sam sighs quietly, palming a line from his thigh to his knee, but when he looks up, Adam’s gaze is tracking the slow motion of his hands. It’s the first reaction Sam’s had and, initially, he thinks it’s Michael.
Adam meets his eyes, blinks once and his voice is hollow. Human.
“You’re not my brother,” He says. “I don’t have any brothers.”
The next time Sam sees someone in the cage, both Michael and Lucifer are standing by the window and there’s a strange sound like the hush of a thousand voices in query as they murmur to each other. It tingles along Sam’s skin like the first breeze he’s felt in a hundred years.
Lucifer’s wrapped a hand around one of the bars and Michael’s arms are folded over his chest again.
Sam knows he should be concerned.
Especially when they both turn to look at him like that.
But he can’t bring himself to care. None of them are going anywhere and the world is safe while that’s true.
He expects an ambush, for the other shoe to drop like a boot between his shoulders, forcing his face down into the dirt, but the twist comes not as he expects.
He’s tried to count the days with marks in the dirt, or notches in the wall, but the light never changes and his marks disappear.
Sam’s hovering in his favoured corner again and the angels are back.
Michael looks in all respects like Adam, sitting with his back against the wall, elbows on his knees again. Lucifer is stooped before him on his haunches, head cocked as he murmurs in that voice of soft concern that does strange things to Sam’s sense of reality.
There’s a smirk on Michael’s face before he kicks the cloud of dirt in Lucifer’s face.
Sam hears the curse. Lucifer is flattened on his back and Michael crawls over him, weight on the devil’s thighs as he crushes him back into the dirt with a long, hungry kiss and Sam sees Lucifer’s shoulders slacken before he reaches for the hands pushing through his clothes and –
Sam has to stop watching.
But the moment he shuts his eyes, he feels the hands in his hair, the rolling weight against his hips and he realises that he’s the one on his back in the dirt moaning through a kiss that’s leaving him completely open for Adam to suck on his tongue and trail teeth over his lower lip.
Adam?
Sam shakes the dirt from his eyes, pushing Adam back with a wet sound as he shoves himself up to his elbows. Adam’s harsh exhale breathes into his mouth, but when his eyes open, they’re blue and clear and human.
It doesn’t make sense and judging by the way Adam searches his face, the question must be clear, but he doesn’t wait for Sam’s answer and just curls his hands tighter in the thin shirt. When Adam’s next kiss tips his head back, Sam feels Lucifer surge with the groan in his throat before the hands on Adam’s hips dig enough to bruise and the next time Sam looks, Adam’s face clouds with Michael.
Sam understands now that he was never completely alone in the cage.
He can’t tell if it’s Adam or the angel that pushes a hand down between them. Adam’s jacket is still caught around his elbows when he rolls against Sam with them both in his hand. He bucks in surprise, the thighs around his hips clench before Adam can tip backwards and Sam thinks Lucifer has a hand in strangling his flute of urgent, desperate noise.
There’s nothing familiar or sensible about this: it’s Adam, and Michael, and Lucifer, and when Sam knew it was ‘them against us’, this was not what he expected. He neither pegged Michael to start anything like this, or for Adam to concede.
If he did.
“Adam – Adam wait,” Sam says.
He manages to push himself into a seated position, groaning through the pleasure of that terrible judgment call when Adam winds himself further into Sam’s lap and leans bodily against him through the next thrust.
“Come on, Sam,” Adam says, twisting upward slide of his hand and Sam’s arms nearly give out, “Or are you going to leave me out here on my own again?”
It’s a cheap shot, but it’s enough to derail Sam’s brain from the slickness of Adam’s hand to the honest resentment of that question.
Adam was the one left behind every time it mattered to be a Winchester. He was secondary, they all knew it and though it was honestly unintended, Sam’s working his throat to form an apology when Adam’s forehead pushes against his.
“You’re not my brother, Sam,” He says, not in the ways it counts, like that’s any reason not to be sorry. He’s stopped rocking against Sam, but he abruptly shudders, wincing softly and the aborted noise in his throat leaves Sam wondering just what Michael’s doing to him.
When Adam’s eyes slit open again, his pupils are blown wide. It’s a bolt of lust straight to Sam’s groin and he’s already grasping Adam closer with hands under his thighs, when the words are growled against his lips.
“So, stop acting like it.”
There’s a rumble of approval in his chest when Sam tilts into the next kiss, tearing Adam free of his jacket, and he can’t tell if the triumph is his or Lucifer’s because in the next moment there’s a new and very insistent pull from within his chest that is definitely none of them.
Sam startles when he feels it again, the pull away and up that numbs his arms. He looks over his shoulder and sees nothing there.
Adam’s face is careful, but Lucifer is laughing and Sam has a feeling that he had expected this.
“What’s going on?” Sam asks, not really expecting an answer.
One of the universal truths: He would never let us join, Lucifer says, but it’s angry despite the triumph and Sam still doesn’t know how he’s won.
A fracture of light veins the ceiling at the next pull, almost bowing Sam with its power, and he finally thinks he understands what’s happening.
Adam’s hands have come to rest at Sam’s elbows. Sam feels the tremor of his chuckle, but the familiar resignation in his face makes Sam sick.
“I guess it worked,” Adam says.
Sam tightens his hold and Adam doesn’t protest, but he doesn’t help Sam either.
“You’re coming with me,” Sam says.
“Sure,” Adam shrugs with an unconvincing smile, “I’ll be right behind you.”
The final pull is a vicious wrench and Lucifer is torn from him like a hook ripped through his side, raw and without preamble.
But when Sam surfaces alone from the graveyard breathing real air and all the smells of the forest at night, Dean’s not there; there’s no suited angel to explain why he just left his younger brother at the mercy of two sociopathic archangels and he almost goes mad in the first three months.
So, when Dean asks him a year later why he’s not crippled with the trauma of his time in the cage, he thinks of Adam, of Lucifer’s strange vigil over him and he can answer honestly.
It could have been much, much worse.
He remembers how the ceiling of the cage had fractured and considers that maybe Adam had been telling the truth, whether he realised it or not at the time.
The door was broken open for Sam.
If they were lucky, maybe Adam wasn’t far behind, after all.
