Archive of Our Own ^beta

The cage is a garden. Sam wasn’t expecting that.

It’s not the one Sam remembers from heaven. This one is more a Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil vibe. Tombs and roses. Faint, theatrical moonlight, but no moon. Sam is flat on his back on a bleached, weather-eaten sarcophagus. He’s scratched and bleeding from the brambles netted over it. Without thinking, he sucks the beading of blood from a long scratch across his knuckles. The stale hit of recycled power washes through him. For a moment the garden pulses around him, walls of thorns undulating like a disturbed reflection, then it stills.

Sam waits for something to happen. Torture, demons, hallucinations. Lucifer. There are stealthy shadows in the corners of his mind, movements in shards of mirror, but no face. Rustlings in the bushes. The echoes of a voice strolling in the garden in the cool of the evening.

That’s probably the wrong garden. Adam’s not here. Nor is Michael. No archangels, no flaming swords.

After a while he notices that the brambles are growing, circling his wrists, his thighs, his neck, creeping in a leftward slant across his heart. They’re no longer brown and woody and studded with buds. They’re made of glass, exquisite. He can see the blood fill them, rising first as a clinging, translucent film along the inner walls, then as a dense line of ruby, almost black, coursing along the transparent branches in a shuddering surge, driven by the sluggish beats of his heart.

“Sam, Sam.” Lucifer is there from one moment to the next. He’s wearing a white suit, and Sam’s own face, scabbed and decaying. “I’m disappointed in you. Oh, not for your little rebellion, or for trapping us here – though obviously that was stupid. Still, anyone can have a moment of weakness. Brothers are distracting. More for you than for most, it seems. Here. You must be thirsty.”

Lucifer’s voice is maddeningly leisured, like every word takes a year, like a tape played impossibly slow. But he moves with swift efficiency. He breaks off one of the glass tendrils, like a man picking a rose, and sits, elegant among the thorns, all bedside manner. He pushes Sam’s hair out of his face, the way Dean would, when Sam was sick, and tilts the dark drops into his mouth.

There’s no potency left in his blood now, no solid sustaining hallucinations. Sam waits, hard with desire and anticipated shame, but he feels only an echo of Ruby riding him as he rides the power, tightening her thighs around him while he drinks from her wrist. He sees a flicker of fading images, black and white footage. Jess on the ceiling, smiling, bleeding into his mouth, heavy drops a poisonous silver, like mercury. Ruby and Jess dancing, light and dark, their movements formal as clockwork. Ruby is wearing a garland of the glass thorns, and Sam watches long tendrils brush past Jess’s lips, over the pulse under her jaw, past her left breast, lower. There’s no sound, but he sees her lips part on a gasp before she leans forward and they meet Ruby's.

Lucifer is watching too, expression set in fastidious disgust.

“So this is how your subconscious entertained you, while your sanctimonious brother dried you out those times? You see why I might be disappointed in you, Sam. Your mind to me a kingdom is, but isn’t this a little tawdry? Cheap pornography and stale symbolism. This isn’t you, Sam. Girl-on-girl action, that’s the sort of thing Gabriel would enjoy, or Dean. You were made for better. None of these things was meant to be an end, Sam, not the blood, not your pretty little Jess, not your demon lover. It was never meant to be forever. You were always going to be unfaithful. You were always going to walk away and come to me.”

Lucifer is flicking through Sam’s memories, quick as a secretary with a Rolodex. After Dean had come back, before Jess had died, that one weekend when he’d had both. Sam hadn’t been unfaithful, then, not yet. But he didn’t need a Woman in White to tell him he would be. When he’d pulled down Dean’s zipper that first time, months later, it was like he’d already been given permission, almost a blessing. It was going to happen, so it had already happened. What did it matter if it was happening now? Dean’s cock on his tongue, a salty newness, veined as delicately as a leaf. Sam tastes it again for a moment, past the once and future cloying copper of blood. Lucifer’s eyes on him are cool and diagnostic.

“He was jealous, you know. Not of Jess, she was out of his way soon enough. I'm sure you can guess some part of him thanked us for that. Of Ruby. He hated her. He always wanted to bleed for you himself. Quite the mother pelican, your Dean. Sad, really. You at least had six months. He was infected with your blood before he was born.”

“The more you give flowery speeches about blood, the more I’m quoting Spike in my head,” says Sam tiredly, and it’s Dean speaking in him. Sam has no defiance left. He is the yes-man, after all. But he still has Dean, somewhere in the back of his brain, stubbornly watching TV and bitching. Watching Buffy take the dive for her sister. Yes, Dean would have wanted that, too. Damn right Dean’s a jealous man. Lucifer thinks he’s so insightful, but he’s a pretentious asshole. He’d better watch out. Dean’s going to hunt him down, he’ll come here and kick his butt.

The devil is talking again, never shuts up, worse than Dean.

“Still waiting for Dean to come to the rescue? Break through the hedge of roses and wake you up? I am come into my garden, my sister, my spouse. Or brother, as the case may be. You’d better hope not, Sam. It’s a nasty moment when Dean walks into my gardens. Still, I think you’re safe. Dean’s in the suburban Eden where you put him. What’s that saying, it was Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve? Or Cain and Abel. You were right, Sam, he’s better off. He’s with a real family, where he belongs.”

And Dean is better off. Dean with Lisa and Ben, around a table in Cicero. Jess with Ruby, still dancing in Lucifer’s garden. They glance Sam’s way sometimes, slow smile from Ruby, salacious quirk of Jess’s lips, but they don’t need him, not twined together as they are, the quick flush of blood running between them. Sam doesn’t even need them any more. He can fade, let the last of the blood in him dry to a rusty stain. The brambles are changing again, grey and matted, growing over his legs, his lips, his eyes. Somewhere far off Lucifer is droning on like a fly.

There isn’t any rescue in the end, no angel, no Dean. Sam doesn’t escape. He dissolves, maybe, into a stutter of grainy motes, bleeds through the bars of the cage. He wakes in a sodden field, air atomized by rain, heavy drops in his mouth tasting of nothing but water.

He hotwires a car, the action familiar, the words strange in his mind. He can still remember how to find the house.

It seems like hours that he stands there, staring at the window.

He could walk over. He could put his hand against the solid, clapboard wall of Dean’s home. And netted tendrils would grow from his fingers, tiny suckers, thorns, strangling, picking the walls apart, board from board, seeking till they found Dean. He never needed her blood the way he needs Dean.

He goes as far as the front garden. He touches the fence, just for a moment. White pickets; really, Dean. The paint is dirty and faintly rubbery. He’s close enough that he can hear a clatter of cutlery from inside while they eat. If only they were talking he could hear Dean.

He dusts his fingers off and walks away.