A/N: This is something that I started writing in October of 2013 as a made-to-measure gift for my sister. It's taken so long to finish that's it's just in time for her 18th birthday. :)

One note on the formatting. This is a long piece to have all in one go, and technically it is separated into 13 parts, but some of them are so tiny that it would have been irritating (to post and to read) to give them each their own page. I really gave no thought to how this would work out for posting when I wrote it. So we have everything parceled out, but all on one page. It shouldn't be too bad. I've done longer one shots.

For those who would like music as they read, there's a mix on 8tracks just for this fic. Just follow the 8tracks link on my Profile page and click the one titled 'As a Bruise.' :3

Betas: Voice of the Shadow Realm

Disclaimer: I do not own Supernatural, nor the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

…

As a Bruise

Raven Ehtar

…

I.

…

Sam did his best to avoid the nightmares, and by extension that meant that he had to avoid sleep. If he slept he would dream, and dreams unfailingly resolved themselves into nightmares.

It wasn't a strange phenomenon. A hunter his entire life, Sam had long since accepted that his nighttime imaginings would be of the dark and terrifying variety, sometimes even worse than the terrors he faced when his eyes were open. It was just another one of the facets of a hunter's life that the self-made monsters took over where the flesh, blood, sulfur and ectoplasm left off. It was a rare night that passed without some sort of beast rising out of his subconscious. Fear was a major driving force behind the dark dreams, of course. Fear and vivid memory, but those were things that would dull with repetition and familiarity. Nightmares that ran purely on remembered adrenaline lost their power before long. The nightmares that really got under his skin were the ones that were driven by guilt. And there was plenty of guilt to be had in a hunter's life.

The faces of those Sam had been unable to save rose up again, their eyes accusing, their shrieks and pleas raking at his soul. Sometimes complete memories would play out, so Sam could watch, aware of what was about to happen but unable to change a thing. Even those that Sam had saved haunted his sleep, those who lived but whose lives were forever altered by their brush with the supernatural. All of them came back in those unguarded hours, attacking when his every defense could be thwarted by the laws of dream.

Normally he would stand and face whatever visions came to him. He couldn't hide from them forever, and perhaps he deserved them. It was a way to never forget his past failures and an incentive to keep trying, to keep on with the hunt.

Except that now Sam didn't want the incentive to keep trying. He was running, flat out, and the guilt of running was fuelling the nightmares that pursued him.

The leviathan threat was over. Dick, the big daddy bigmouth, was dead beyond doubt, but to lop off the head of the levi's, the good guys had taken some heavy hits. Kevin was gone, taken by Crowley along with Meg to God knew where. As little as Sam liked the idea of the King of Hell having a Prophet in his control, there was no way for him to draw the demon out, no trick that wouldn't be seen through. And as for Dean and Castiel, who had driven home the killing blow… there was nothing.

No clue had remained in the gore spattered office, nothing to show where the hunter and the angel had disappeared to. Sam had searched the room, and while there had been plenty of exploded Dick coating every surface, there had been a notable lack of human or angel-in-human-vessel remains mixed in. Whether alive or dead, they weren't there, and Sam had no idea where to begin searching for them.

He was tired. He was so, so tired. He'd been tired for a long time – his whole life, it seemed like – but the last few years had been more than any human was meant to endure. On the run from Heaven's army, becoming Satan's vessel, spending over one hundred years in Hell, spending a year soulless, madness, hallucinations, the Mother of all monsters, playing delivery boy for Crowley, dying over and over, facing down leviathans - creatures so old and so strong that God Himself had locked them away in Purgatory…

And now he was alone. Everyone was gone - possibly everyone was dead, including his brother. So, when no other route offered itself, Sam did what he and Dean had always promised each other they would do, but had always been too stubborn to do.

He moved on. He dragged the Impala and what little else he had left to his name back to Rufus' old cabin and laid low, just in case of any stray bigmouths with revenge in mind. He shoved all of his phones into a box, and that into a drawer. All of the supplies and ammo that made up a hunter's inventory, the salt, the holy water, the silver, stakes, crosses, chalk, herbs, blood, bullets and crossbow bolts, all of it went into the storage cupboards in the cellar. All of the books of lore went into the drier storage cabinets on the ground floor. He fixed up the Impala, the only real home he'd ever known, packed it up with his computer, a few fraudulent credit cards to get him by, his clothes – and he drove.

He didn't have a destination, he wasn't on a case. He just needed to move. It wasn't important where he was going, only that the ground never had a chance to get warm under his feet.

If he gave any thought to his direction, it was always in terms of what it was he was driving away from: His life, his entire past. Childhood memories were full of roadside motels and terrible diners, an endless string of towns stretching from one end of the country to the other, only the highway connecting them together, an artery of asphalt and dust, pumping out strung out motorists. Sam joined the flow, determined to leave it behind even as he became a part of its pulse.

He never looked in the rearview mirrors. He fixed his eyes on the flash of the yellow line and put as much road behind him as he could.

But even if he could run from his life, his mind as blank as the horizon he chased, he couldn't outrun the guilt. It gnawed at him as he drove, patient and inexorable. When he slept it pounced.

Of all the things he could dream of, Dean was the one he wanted most to avoid. If he had to face his brother, confronting Sam with his abandonment of 'the family business,' Kevin or him, even in dream, Sam thought he might go insane again.

Caffeine became a regular feature in his days again. Espressos, triple red eyes, energy shots, even the tablets that cross country truckers and students cramming for finals were so fond of, he tossed all of them back to stave off sleep as long as possible. He almost wished he didn't have his soul. At least then he had never actually needed sleep. Of course, without his soul he wouldn't have been aware of the problem, or been troubled by the guilt that had him running from his past. Without his soul, Sam wouldn't be running.

He did have his soul, though, and sleep eventually caught up with him. He fought it back for three days - three days and nights of almost nonstop driving from Rufus' cabin before the stimulants were no longer enough to postpone the needs of his body. Without knowing where he was, he pulled the Impala into the first motel lot he could find that sported a flickering 'VACANCY' sign. In a fog he handed over one of his many scammed cards and dragged himself into the ancient room, so universally familiar that he barely needed to peer at it before steering himself to a bed and toppling into it.

Vague dread hovered around the edges of his consciousness, anticipating the onslaught of nightmares he knew were waiting for him. There was also hope, even vaguer, that he might be too exhausted to dream. In either case, he had nothing left with which to fight back sleep, and it claimed him, completely and silently.

He didn't dream of Dean, or any other specter from his past, but he did dream. He dreamt of one person he'd thought he would never see again.

Blue eyes twinkled at him with wicked delight as a smile stretched over Lucifer's features.

"Hello, Sam."

…

II.

…

"Hello, Sam."

Lucifer smiled the slow, iniquitous smile that Sam knew far too well. Lucifer smiled, and the memory of other smiles crashed over him in a blinding avalanche.

Sam leapt backward out of the bed, his mind-crushing exhaustion fleeing him in an onrush of panic. He'd been too tired when he came in to crawl beneath the blankets, a detail he was very glad of, now. There was nothing to tangle with his legs in his mad scramble for escape. The only thing that stopped him was the wall, and the radiator that struck at the backs of his knees.

The fallen angel showed no surprise at Sam's reaction. Lucifer watched him calmly, his smile only shrinking enough to cover his teeth, blue eyes tracking him lazily as he went from prone on the bed to crouched against the wall. "So much energy!" he commented lightly. "Happy to see me?"

Sam didn't reply. He was trying to understand, desperately trying to understand what was going on. Lucifer was in the Cage, with Michael and Adam! There was no way he could have gotten out, was there? All of the heavy hitters on Earth, Heaven and Hell had been too preoccupied with the leviathan problem to give much thought to the angels in the Cage. Had Lucifer managed to get out on his own?

It was almost unthinkable that he and Michael might have set their differences aside long enough to break out together, but stranger things had happened, a lot of them recently.

Was he hallucinating again, the madness come back to chew on his brain? Castiel, he healed him, had ended up having to siphon the insanity, the memories of Sam's time in Hell into his own head. Visions of Lucifer had ceased, and Sam had been allowed to sleep for the first time in weeks.

Was he relapsing?

Lucifer tilted his head at him. It was the most he had moved since Sam had opened his eyes, and he noticed for the first time that Lucifer was perched on the edge of the second bed, one knee bent up to his chest, bare foot sunk into the mattress.

Sam didn't remember asking for a double room. He must have done it automatically after having done so for so many years.

"At a loss for words, my one and only?" Lucifer smirked, still making no move to rise. "I agree it is a touching moment, together again at last. But please force yourself; I've missed your heady timbre."

"What are you doing here?" Sam finally managed.

"Well, not exactly the welcome I was hoping for, but…"

Sam's heart was still racing, a cold sweat prickling at his palms and between his shoulder blades, but the initial shock was wearing off. He'd dealt with Lucifer before, and though it was about as far from a walk in the park as it was possible to be, and something he had hoped to never have to do again in his life, he had done it before. Experience left him a little more practiced, if not better able to defeat the threat presented. He almost wished he had some of the gear he'd left stashed back in the cabin, even knowing there was nothing in any of it that would so much as scratch Lucifer. Still, it would have been something.

"How?" Sam forced his legs to work, just to break from being frozen, to move and be ready to move if the need arose. "How are you here? Are you real, or are you another hallucination?"

As Sam paced around the wall, Lucifer continued to watch, turning to keep him in his sights. "A hallucination? Have you been having waking dreams about me, Sam? I'm so flattered."

"You're in the Cage!" Sam stopped when he came to the small table. His bag was on it, dropped there when he'd come in. There was nothing inside even vaguely lethal to Lucifer, and the idea of throwing the bag itself as a distraction was laughable, but… "You're still in Hell, I threw you in there, you can't be here!"

"Can't I?" Lucifer's voice went cold. Sam couldn't help the sudden drop he felt in the pit of his stomach. "After all, you got out, and that with the help of none but my teeny-tiny little brother Castiel. Who's to say that I couldn't find my way out of the hot box, now I've been out once already?" He leaned forward, resembling nothing so much as a bird of prey, stooping over some tender morsel far below. Sam leaned away, despite the distance of a room and a bed between them. "Remember what you've been to me, Sam." The smile came back, low and predatory. "Few can say they would go to Hell and back for you quite as literally as I can."

Sam shook his head, his bangs whipping over his eyes. "No. You're not here. If you could get out, you would have done it a long time ago. You're not real."

"So say millions of the little hairless apes, but we both know that's not really true. I'm as real as the bruise you find in the morning."

He shook his head again. "No." He gulped, recognizing the dangerous skip in the rhythm of his heartbeat, the half swallowed sob as he gulped air. "Not real," he ground out between his teeth. He bowed his head, squeezing his eyes shut, refusing to look at Lucifer, to acknowledge his existence. "Not real not real not real not real…"

It was a desperate mantra, but it was all he had. He had to believe that Lucifer was still in his Cage, that this was some sort of residual vision, and that if he could only concentrate hard enough, it would go away. Lucifer was not back, and he was not going insane again. It would be fine; it would all be fine if he could only get some control over his own mind.

When he ran out of breath, he dragged in another. He continued the chant until it no longer felt like his heart would burst; his body slowly relaxing from its wound-wire tightness. The longer he went on without interruption, the more confident he became. He'd been right; everything was going to be fine.

Slowly, Sam opened his eyes and lifted his head. His knees went a little weak with relief when he saw the second bed was empty. The breath he'd held came out in a rush. He stumbled back to bed, wondering if the scare would have him lying awake for hours, or if the last three days of caffeine abuse would have him giving back into sleep immediately.

He toed off his shoes, another thing he hadn't bothered with before, and wondered just how concerned over this incident he should be. It might have been a once-off, a weird echo of the madness he'd had before, or just a result of staying awake for so long. It might be nothing serious at all. Not everything in life had to be related to the supernatural. There were people who went through their whole lives knowing nothing at all about them. There had to come a time when something in his own life could be explained rationally.

He'd just resolved to not worry about the episode unless and until it repeated itself as he was pulling back the blankets, determined to use them this time.

"As a bruise, Sam."

Sam fell forward over the bed, heart in mouth when the cold breath hit his ear. Scrabbling for the second time within ten minutes, Sam flipped to his back. Lucifer was standing over him, a smirk playing his lips.

He spread his arms wide, as though presenting a conjuring trick to an appreciative audience. "I'm as real as you are, Sam. But if you like, I'll tell you a secret."

"Oh, yeah? What would that be?" he demanded with more steel than he thought he could manage. He was trying to prop himself up on his elbows and scoot away at the same time. The fallen angel appeared unconcerned by Sam's attempt to put distance between them.

Unconcerned, and entirely flippant about personal space in general.

Lucifer lowered himself onto the bed, crawling over Sam until his lips were beside his ear. Sam froze, a thousand memories of Hell jostling, trying to rise up and be remembered. He pushed them back.

Lucifer's breath was icy cold as it fluttered across his ear. Sam could practically feel his lips, moving millimeters away from his lobe. "I am as real as you are," the devil confided. "But I am also as substantial as a hallucination."

It took a moment before the meaning sunk in. When it did, he jerked his head back to stare at the man hanging over him, his ice chip eyes far too close for comfort. All of him was too close for comfort.

"As real as me, and a hallucination? Are you saying I'm not real?"

Lucifer shrugged, a difficult thing to do when supporting part of his weight on his hands.

Sam gritted his teeth, and decided to take a small risk. He maneuvered one of his own hands around until it was in a position to grab Lucifer's wrist. Despite how close they were, they had yet to touch. Very deliberately, he wrapped his fingers around the joint. The flesh was cold, but undeniably solid, muscle and bone palpable beneath the chilly skin. He looked back up at Lucifer, who was observing the procedure with amusement.

Sam nodded at his hand, still holding Lucifer's wrist. "So, what does that mean?"

"Other than I was telling the truth when I said I would never lie to you?" He shrugged again. "You were the smart one on the dream team, you tell me."

He tried not to grind his teeth, when something Lucifer said caught his attention. A smile began to break over his face as he thought about it, and became a full grin by the time he looked back at Lucifer.

"It's a dream," he said softly. When Lucifer didn't reply, he said more loudly. "I'm dreaming! You're as real as I am, but you're still not real!"

Lucifer's smirk twisted, became mocking and cruel even as realization and relief washed over Sam. "I wouldn't get too excited about that," he purred. "This is a dream, yes, but far from 'only.' I am still as real as you, come to visit in a non-physical space. Dreams can be a terrifying place. Besides," his eyes glittered.

"How long can you go without sleep?"

…

III.

…

The familiarity of the game he was playing was almost enough to sicken Sam. It was like when Lucifer had been with him, a constant companion, refusing to allow him even the slightest amount of sleep. The only difference was that now his insomnia was by choice, to avoid seeing Lucifer in his dreams. He was never around while Sam was awake, which he considered an incredible improvement. He was only there when Sam dreamed. But he was always there when Sam dreamed, which he did every time he slept. He never exhausted himself enough to snuff out the dreams, and never dreamed of anything else.

Always, it was Lucifer.

Instead of trying to sleep to escape the devil, now he was fighting to stay awake for exactly the same reason. But without some supernatural 'assistance' Sam just wasn't able to stave off sleep for much more than three days at a time. That was when he really did begin to hallucinate again. When that began to happen was when Sam would hunt up a motel, or pull off to some semi-private shoulder in the road, and allow himself to drop off for a few hours.

His dreams were never that bad, Sam had to admit to himself grudgingly. It was only due to Lucifer's presence that he qualified them as nightmares at all. They were far, far removed from anything that Hell had to offer, and weren't even so bad as the weeks he had endured with the fallen angel as a bunk buddy. His surroundings in the dreams never changed from what they had been when he fell asleep, be it in the interior of the Impala or a cheap motel room. That alone lent some weight to his suspicion that he wasn't actually sleeping, but hallucinating. But when he woke, he felt rested. Not so rested as if he had been allowed peaceful nights, but enough to know he had slept.

As for Lucifer himself… mostly he just talked.

Of course, a lot of the time Lucifer had spent as a hallucination had also been spent talking, but time not spent chatting had been filled out with gruesome images, noises, sensations. In his dreams, so far, there was none of that. Lucifer restricted himself to talk, but Sam found that 'talk,' for how innocent it sounded, was more than enough.

It was hard for Sam to decide, when he chose to give the matter more than passing thought, if the Lucifer in his dreams was real or not. He wanted to believe that what he was experiencing was just a new kind of persistent nightmare. Not as serious as the visions in his madness, but still a construction of his own mind.

He said that he was as real as Sam. He'd taken the statement at face value at first, that in the landscape of his dream the two of them were on equal footing. But he wondered, now, if it didn't also mean that when the dream ended, they were still each as solid as the other. That as Sam woke from the nightmares, somewhere Lucifer was doing the same.

Was the guilt following him into his dreams, or was it a more solid form of his past that he couldn't lose on the highway?

…

IV.

…

Real or dream, Lucifer knew exactly how to get under Sam's skin, which buttons to push and which panels to lift that would give him access to the deepest and most painful parts of his psyche.

Sam would spend days endlessly driving from one end of the country to the other, finding every kind of side road and hidden byway, all the while carefully thinking of nothing at all. Then, when endurance and stimulants finally gave way, he would spend hours at the mercy of Lucifer's acerbic insights. He was never able to wake himself up, and had to wait until his body was ready to it on its own to escape.

In the meantime Lucifer took delight in filling his ear and tearing apart what little peace remained him.

"I have to say, I'm a mite surprised, Sam," he would drawl. "You just don't seem the type to run away from your problems like this. What happened to that charming go-get-'em spirit that was the Winchester calling card? Hm? Packing up and walking away from it all, it just doesn't seem right. Does it?"

It was harder to block out Lucifer's voice in dreams than in reality. When awake he'd had an entire world, cases and Dean to distract him. In dreams the range of what else he could concentrate on was severely limited.

In motels he was limited by the room and what it contained. He tried the television several times, but the best his sleeping mind could conjure up were looping infomercials for hunter's supplies. On one occasion the screen managed to show snippets of his own life, like the world's worst collection of home movies, and Sam switched it off and kept his hands off of all televisions from then on. The world outside was a blank void, so he couldn't leave, and he rather suspected Lucifer would follow him in any case. Stuck in the motel room, Sam read in hopes that print would drown out the devil's lazy mocking. He quickly learned to pack at least two books in his bags. The one source of reading material in all motels, Gideon's Bible, provided him with plenty to read, but did very little in way of taking his mind off of things. He never remembered what he read on waking, and it did little to block out Lucifer's voice, but it was better than nothing.

Those nights when he slept in the Impala, Sam drove. The world around them would eventually melt away, or simply repeat over and over, but the Impala never changed. It was almost like his days, driving to no point, the scenery irrelevant, only the wheel and roll of the road holding any meaning to him. Except for the gently smiling devil sitting in the passenger's seat, commenting on his driving, it was all the same.

"Although, I am forgetting the time when you packed up and left your brother and your father to strike out on your own for college. You were running from your life, the responsibilities that John had settled on your shoulders. Actually you'd done the same thing when you were a child, hadn't you? Just got a wild hair of independence and took off, holed up in some stranger's house. So that's two. Does the time you left your school to run off with Dean count, do you think, Sam? You were going back to the life, sure, but weren't you also running from your friends, from Jess's friends, so you wouldn't have to face them?"

Lucifer paused. Out of the corner of his eye Sam could see him tilt his head at him, cold eyes boring into him as he concentrated on the road, his knuckles going white with the force of his grip. When Sam refused to respond, Lucifer shrugged and turned his head to watch the passing trees of the dream landscape.

"I suppose," he said carelessly, "that monsters and ghosts were just easier to face than the people who thought they knew you, who lost a dear friend because she just happened to be close to you."

Sam ground his teeth and drove on. He did not pay attention to what Lucifer was saying to him. He did not allow his mind to wander back to those memories that he was dredging up. He did not give what the devil was saying any thought whatsoever. And he was most certainly not allowing himself to feel any sort of shame or rage.

The steering wheel creaked in his grip.

Lucifer didn't wait long before he continued. "And now here you are, on the road again, running from the problem. Not that I can say I blame you. The last of your family, every place of safety destroyed or compromised, the end of the world narrowly avoided – again. No, I can see why you would want to leave that all behind, all of that mess. I sympathize. Especially when you consider Dean…"

Sam tensed.

"You two boys could never seem to catch a break, could you? Just one tragedy after another. It's hardly worth the effort of trying to judge which of you have had it worst over the years. Both of you have been through more than any human could be reasonably expected to bear. Even though you are my vessel, I almost feel sorrier for Dean in this case. He finally takes down the biggest bad of them all, is blasted to who knows where for his trouble, and his brother, the one he could always depend on… just leaves."

The trees on either side of the road continued to whip past the Impala, their darkened ranks stretching off into the moonlight. In the real world the forest would have been left behind a long time ago. Here the slender trunks were never ending. The engine ran, the rumble of the road came up through tires and frame to travel up Sam's spine. The feel of seat and wheel were so familiar they cast a kind of spell over him, a trance where he could believe that he was anywhere, at any time, floating free from the moors of his life.

If only Lucifer would leave him be.

"He could be dead," he went on, face still turned to the window. "And if that were the case, I don't think anyone would blame you for taking off. You even had a pact with him, right, that when one of you died the other would live a quote unquote normal life? As if there is such a thing. Of course, you never let death or pacts stop you from saving each other. But you didn't even try this time."

Lucifer turned back to look at Sam. It was hard to tell from his peripheral vision, but he almost looked tired.

"What was the problem this time, mm? Did big brother hit the end of his frequent flier miles, was it too much to bear to drag him out of whatever hole he fell into, or did you just not care enough anymore?"

Silence, save for the steady throb of the engine, stretched. Unlike when Lucifer had been a hallucination, he rarely prodded Sam for a direct response. He seemed content enough to ramble on his own. This was one of his most blatant bids for a reply of some kind, to sit and wait, silent and staring.

Eventually Lucifer sighed and gave it up. "Even in your sleep, you're still running away," he muttered.

Sam ignored him and drove on.

…

V.

…

"Buddy, are you alright?"

Sam's head jerked up. He squinted at the face floating in front of him, expecting to see the familiar set of Lucifer's features, the blue eyes, the blond hair. Instead a much younger face, one pocked with acne scars and topped with messy brown hair was staring back at him with nearsighted concern.

Memories of where he was and what he'd been doing seeped back into Sam's brain as he took in the counter between him and the boy, the cash register at his side, the rows upon rows of cigarettes and lottery tickets behind him. He looked down, and saw that he'd put up half a dozen protein bars and four bottled waters. He blinked, shook his head, and tried to reassure the gas station attendant.

"Yeah. Yeah, I'm fine. Just a long time on the road, is all."

The boy grunted, started ringing up his things. "Well, I gotta tell you, dude, you look like six kinds of Hell. You'd best find some time for sleep soon. You'll get someone killed the way you are right now."

Sam pinched the bridge of his nose, unsure if he was feeling a headache or if his head had always felt like it was splitting in two. He didn't try to smile for fear the strain might finish him off.

"That, plus thirty on pump one," the boy said. He looked at Sam. "That all?"

Sam looked around the counter. As a last thought, he picked up a handful of the energy shots all stations seemed to have right beside the cash registers. "These, too."

The boy scanned them obediently, pulling a face. "These work in a pinch, dude, but seriously try and catch a few winks. Nothing beats a good night's sleep, right?"

He only grunted in reply, slapping down the cash for his order and picking up the bag. Already twisting the cap off of one of the small, brightly colored bottles, Sam walked back out to the Impala.

…

VI.

…

There was only so long that Sam could win the fight against sleep. Even when the devil had been acting as an alarm, never allowing him to drift off for more than a few seconds, his body had eventually begun to fail. Without that sort of outside help – even if it had been from his own head – the battle was a losing one. He slept for a couple of hours every few nights, averaging six hours of sleep for every sixty-six awake. But even that wasn't nearly enough. Finally his body overrode everything else and Sam slept for over twenty hours.

What disturbed him the most about the experience wasn't how long he spent trapped with Lucifer, though the very thought of being trapped with him again was enough to produce nightmares on its own. What disturbed him was just how disturbing it wasn't.

All Lucifer did was talk, occasionally prod at Sam for a response or acknowledgement, or fiddle around with whatever was at hand. By itself, the talking and what he chose to talk about were bad enough, but it wasn't a thing compared to what he could do if he chose to. If anyone knew that it was Sam, who had shared the fallen angel's head. He knew what Lucifer was capable of.

Yet he did none of it. He just talked, and what he said was becoming repetitive, losing its sting as well as its threat as Lucifer continually failed to do anything more Satanic than throw a Gideon's Bible against a wall. Sam actually found himself relaxing in his presence.

He was fully aware of just how stupid that was, what could happen if he lowered his guard. At the same time, though, if he continued to exhaust himself, then if and when the other shoe dropped he would be in no condition to deal with it. There was no way of knowing if he could deal with it even if he were at the top of his game, but strung out as he was he wouldn't stand a chance.

Slowly, Sam allowed himself more and more sleep. Nothing in the dreams changed. If Lucifer even noticed that Sam was around more often and for longer, he said nothing about it.

Sam relaxed a little more, to the point where he would reply to some of Lucifer's jabs. They sparred, and Sam wondered a little at what his life had become.

So far as it was possible for there to be peace between him and the devil, there was peace. Nights became surprisingly restful.

Until the blood came up.

…

VII.

…

"I can't decide which is more depressing," Lucifer was saying one night, giving their newest motel room a long suffering look. "The fact that there is so little difference from one of these places to the next, or that they try so hard to generate one."

He had been talking, as per usual, almost nonstop since Sam had fallen asleep and then consequently 'woken up' in the dream bed. Tonight's theme seemed to be the pathetic condition of humanity in general. Sam was pretending to read a book on engineering – because why not? – sitting on the bed, his back against the headboard. He was pretending rather than actually reading because he was having trouble focusing on the words.

Sam had spent all of the time with Lucifer in these dreams doing his best to ignore him; that he was even there. Sam was doing his level best to think as little as possible about Lucifer, himself, where he was, what he was doing or anything at all. It was conscious and willful denial, and he was rather good at it – a fact that was also dutifully ignored. The last few nights, though, he had been struggling to maintain that careful blankness. His mind was beginning to buzz with questions and speculations, and no amount of self control could keep his thoughts quiet any longer. He was running from his life, but some things had been trained into him so well there was no leaving them behind. Little things like questioning why Satan seemed to be so fond of keeping him company.

He was running from his life, but certain aspects of that life had no trouble in keeping up with him.

"… like humans themselves. Trying so hard, but when you really get down to it, every one of you is just a box with a rickety bed and a toilet that doesn't flush properly."

"Why are you here?"

It was one of the few times he had spoken to his unwanted companion, and the first time he had initiated rather than being goaded into replying. Lucifer seemed mildly surprised. He blinked at Sam, one corner of his mouth twitching, as though he were holding back a grin. "Why? I should have thought that was fairly obvious, Sam."

"Enlighten me."

The grin lurking at the corner of Lucifer's mouth spread to reveal gleaming white incisors. "Always a pleasure." He rearranged his limbs to better face Sam. He had been perched on the table, looking around the room in a display of examining the poor surroundings. He hopped down and swung a leg over a chair, sitting in it backwards. He stared at Sam for a moment, looking him up and down from across the room. As Sam struggled to keep from squirming under the scrutiny, Lucifer pointed at him. "I'm here because you are here."

Sam's book closed with a snap. It was the first time he had really spoken to Lucifer since the first night, but he was abruptly impatient. It felt as though they had been dancing around this issue, even if it had never been voiced aloud, for the last month.

"What does that mean?" he snapped, sitting forward. "You're here because I'm here? Are you here to torture me, to try and make me your vessel again, to torment me, what? Why are you here?"

Lucifer seemed amused. "Torture and torment, taking you for my vessel… Are those the only reasons you can imagine why I would be here?"

"What other reason could there be? I don't think even you would try to convince me to bust you out of the Cage."

"No, no, not that. But consider this, Sam: I might be here because this is the only place I can be, the only available reprieve from my prison. I might be here because of the connection we share. I might very well be here because I have no more choice in the matter than you do. Though I can think of thousands of less agreeable situations, all things considered."

Sam snorted. "And now there's a connection, huh? Some sort of deep bond meant to link us even unto Hell?"

The blue stare on Sam was intense. "There has always been a connection, Sam. Long before you were born, it was there, waiting."

"Bull." Tossing aside the book, Sam got to his feet and began to pace, his fingers curling and uncurling, curling and uncurling into fists. "I'm not any more special than the few dozen others Azazel tainted. I haven't forgotten old Yellow Eyes, what he was doing to generate his 'psychic kids,' or that they were all meant for you. Any of them could have been your vessel, and if Dean hadn't sold his soul to bring me back to life, someone else would have been!"

For a moment Lucifer didn't reply. The silence served to remind Sam of who it was he was speaking to. He wondered for a moment if picking a fight with Satan was really the wisest of courses, but quickly tossed the concern aside. He'd already been to Hell, he'd lost everything, he was an escapee from his own life and the devil was camped in his subconscious. What could he do that was any worse than what had already been done?

When Lucifer spoke, his voice was soft. It was the same kind of gentling tone he had used so long ago, when he had first appeared in Sam's dreams as Jess, and then as himself, quietly assuring him that he would be his vessel. "No. There was no possibility for it to have been anyone else. I've told you before, Sam: It had to be you. Even your death served a purpose. By that, Hell received Dean's soul, the key to breaking the first seal. It was too delicately balanced. There could have been no other outcome. You were my only possible vessel."

Sam stopped, staring. "But those other kids," he protested. "If there was no chance for them from the beginning, then what was the point? Why involve them, why make us fight in your twisted battle royale?"

"Imagine what would have happened, had I given Azazel the name of my vessel." There was a sneer in his voice. "Demons, for all their 'loyal intentions,' are a mess of organization. If I had given them a single name to focus on, everything would have inevitably been bungled. Had they known your exact importance from the start, well, then we wouldn't be here now. But if I arranged it so you were one among many and trusted to you to get through it all, to find your own way to me," he smiled again. "Then I knew I wouldn't be disappointed."

Lucifer and others had said more than once that Sam had been the only choice for a vessel, that it had to be him, but he had never allowed himself to think too closely about it. The idea that he, his brother, his mother, his father, and all the generations that had come before were only pieces of a puzzle, being jockeyed into position by some unseen hand was one that made Sam feel ill. It rankled, like chains lain across him, tangling his supposed free will. It was worse than anything he had experienced with John, who at least only tried to control what he did with his life. This, if it were true, was controlling his life, the lives of those around him, his actions, possibly his thoughts, and all the while making it seem as though it were his idea.

It was destiny, if you went in for that kind of thing.

Sam was too stubborn, too independent to buy into the destiny claptrap anymore.

He wiped a hand over his face, trying not to think but compelled to do just that. "But you still had to depend on demons. They had to set up the board, maneuver us into place," Sam scoffed. "Feed me demon blood."

"Actually, the demon blood was a bit of a cheat," Lucifer admitted reflectively. When Sam looked up at him, he shrugged. "A substitute, actually. Demon blood wasn't the best of choices – too many nasty little side effects. But it was much more available than the preferred substance."

"Which was?"

Lucifer stared at him, blue eyes like ice staring straight to the back of his skull. "Angel blood."

The disbelief that crashed over him must have shown, because Lucifer's smile widened. He shook his head. "Don't look so shocked, Sam. Even without knowing for certain, you must have realized that angel blood would be more powerful than anything that came out of filthy demons; more suitable for you as well, my vessel. The problem is getting hold of the stuff. Until you reached a certain age, there wasn't any angel blood, any angels in their vessels to tap. So, demon blood it was. Kind of like diet Coke, or decaf coffee."

"You can't be serious."

"I wouldn't joke about something like this, Sam. And you know that I never lie to you." He shifted again, so his arms were draped over the back of the chair, his hands and his fingers hanging free. "Angel blood would have made you more powerful, stronger, enhanced your abilities. It would have done everything the demon blood had done, but without turning you into a thrall. You might crave it, but it wouldn't tear apart your insides if you stopped." His fingers moved, sketching out absent patterns in the air. Sam watched them because it was easier than looking the devil in the eye.

"The blood of an angel would have been more of a shock, but not one that lasted long. You are a vessel. My vessel. It might kill others to drink it, but not you. For you, it would have become a part of you. It would have changed you, truly preparing you for taking your place. But," Lucifer sat back a little, hands gripping the chair, "angels are even more paranoid than demons, and infinitely harder to bleed."

Sam shook his head, trying to find some other place to look, but nothing held his gaze. The interior of a cheap motel room on the edge of one nowhere headed into another was not a select place to find inspiration. "Well, it's all over now," he muttered. "No more apocalypse, no more leviathans, and as far as I can tell, no more angels. It's done and I'm moving on." When he looked up at Lucifer, he was watching Sam with a curious expression. "There's nothing left for either of us, and I want you gone."

Cold eyes narrowed at him. "Moving on. Really? Do you really think that's what you're doing, or that it's you who gets to pick and choose when something is well and truly over? I've been playing out this story for millennia, Sam, and it will take more than one defeat and the word of a man to write me out of it now." He took a breath, and Sam realized that his voice had been rising. "My plans are all in tatters, but I remain. Somehow you remain as well. You are my vessel—"

"I am not your vessel!"

Lucifer did not look surprised at the outburst, but he did fall silent. Sam took the opportunity provided.

"Once I was, but not anymore. Never again. You talk about me like all I ever was, was your vessel, a disposable container. News flash: Holy genetic tampering made me your vessel, and that is only a part of who I ever was. And now that's gone."

"It's not gone," Lucifer said quietly. "Vessel or not, the connection between us will remain even after death."

Sam suppressed a shiver. It was a small fear, which he could normally put far, far at the back of his mind. Since coming back – completely – from Hell, he worried that when he died for the final time he would return there. Memories of his time in the Cage, at the mercies of two angels too full of rage to be anything but the personifications of horror and suffering, mixed with visions of being welcomed back into their waiting hands after his death. They drowned out the dim memory of Heaven, of the reassurance that he had been there once and could be there again. He had said 'Yes' to Lucifer. Why would he ever be allowed back into Heaven?

All Sam could look forward to was the lick of fire and the tearing of flesh. And a familiar face amid it all.

"You're lying," he croaked.

"I've never lied to you."

"Then who's to say that you're really Lucifer? I have no reason to believe that you're anything but a nightmare that refuses to leave. Lucifer is in the Cage, stuck with Adam and Michael. You say you're here because I am, but that doesn't explain how." In defiance of what he was about to say and in what he believed, his palms began to sweat. He blotted them on his jeans. "You're not real. None of this is real, and Lucifer is still in his Cage!"

Sam expected his declaration to generate some kind of reaction. Laughter and mocking jibes, a flare of anger, a scoff or show of disappointment… but there was nothing. For a full minute Lucifer did nothing more than watch Sam, motionless.

"It's taken you some time to come to that conclusion," he finally commented, very quietly. The relative stillness of him was worse, in a way, than if he had leapt up and attacked him. "Almost as though you weren't certain of it."

"I am," he lied. "You are not here."

"That so?"

Lucifer did not dismount from his chair. He simply stood up and then tossed the chair to the side. It clattered against the wall before coming to a stop, a pathetic thing with four legs helpless in the air. Sam twitched. His whole body was on high alert, ready.

It didn't matter if he believed, if his knew that this was all a dream. The fighting instincts honed to a sharp and lethal edge over a lifetime, combined with an even deeper seated instinct to fear this man, scored into him over the course of nearly two centuries made it hard for him to hold his ground as Lucifer approached.

The devil had an easy, rolling gait, one that communicated that he was at ease, nonthreatening, friendly even. But Sam knew him too well, had seen the same stride too many times, and could recognize the stalking predator that lurked in his gentle frame, his sinews, even as not the least outward clue was given.

Even as he commanded his body to remain absolutely still, his muscles trembled. He knew danger, had lived through more than most could even imagine. He waited for the familiar calm before a battle to descend. It never did.

Lucifer halted, only a foot left between them, limbs loose, something that wasn't quite a smile in his eyes. "Are you completely certain of that?" His voice was low, smooth, calming.

Sam felt every hair on his body rise. "Yes."

"What would you say, then, if I told you I could prove that I am real, and not just some figment of your overloaded imagination?"

"I'd say there was nothing you could do to convince me of that."

"Truly?"

"Yes!"

"Good." Something familiar, something dangerous, flickered over the fallen angel's features. Then he flinched, grunting. Sam twitched, almost leapt back, but there was no attack. Instead, Lucifer lifted up his right hand, palm up, fingers slightly cupped.

It took a moment for Sam to realize what Lucifer was doing, what he was offering up to him like a gift. When he saw, he flinched back.

Blood.

Lucifer's voice seemed to come from a long way off, though he was certain the devil had actually gotten even closer. The blood seemed much closer. "If you're right and this is only a dream, then this should give you no trouble at all."

Sam had to swallow before he could speak, and even then his voice came out hoarse, strained. "What?"

The hand lifted slightly. A small pool of crimson was pooled in the cup of Lucifer's palm, the viscous liquid clinging in the folds and prints of his hand. Sam couldn't tell what kind of expression he was wearing now – his tone was neutral, and Sam couldn't seem to raise his head to glance up. "This is your proof, Sam, one way or another. Drink. If I'm only a dream, nothing will happen, and you get to think long and hard about the Freudian implications of having the Adversary chatting with you every night. If I'm real, then this will let you know it when you wake up."

"What will it do if it's real?" Just barely, he thought he could smell a coppery tang.

There was a small laugh in Lucifer's voice when he said, "Not so certain after all? If I am really here, and this is real blood that you drink, it won't harm you in any way. Angel and demon blood are not the same. You won't have a relapse into your addiction. They say alcoholics are never cured, but forever recovering, that their sobriety is a constant battle that any slip could destroy… This isn't whiskey I'm offering you, Sam."

"What is it, then?"

"Clarity."

He did look up from the hand then, and its proffered drink. There was no mocking in Lucifer's eyes, no challenge; even his soft smile was absent. He was curiously blank of all expression, only watching Sam as he struggled to decide.

He should refuse. It was the obvious choice. Lucifer said he never lied to him, and in a way that was true, but not lying wasn't exactly the same thing as telling the truth. Another angel had put it rather well: Keeping certain truths from him to manipulate his actions. If Lucifer said that it wouldn't cause him to relapse… he was inclined, however reluctantly, to believe him. He couldn't help it; he just did, despite everything. But it didn't mean he trusted Lucifer. There were any number of things that could come about from drinking angel blood, archangel blood, and Lucifer's to boot.

He wasn't as certain of Lucifer's reality as he tried to sound. Not enough to take this kind of risk. He should refuse, go back to reading his engineering textbook and ignore Lucifer until he woke up.

He should refuse.

Lucifer hadn't moved. When he spoke, it was so quiet it bordered on a whisper. "You can always say no."

It might have been the way Lucifer said it, like it truly was his choice - that Lucifer wouldn't do anything to influence that choice one way or another. It might have been the fact that Lucifer was suggesting that he say 'no,' rather than 'yes,' a subtle encouragement to simply repeat the word. It might have just been the fact that Lucifer was telling him he had a choice at all, rather than telling him that his free will was all an illusion, that while he was waiting for Sam to say 'yes,' it was a foregone conclusion that he would say yes.

Maybe he would have said yes, regardless.

It wasn't like demon blood. Demon blood had been like a drug, in more ways than one. It had hooked into him, seducing him to its call by filling him with the sense of power, of control, of freedom, of all those things Sam had craved in his life but always been denied. It had filled an aching need that nothing else had ever done. It was one reason why it had been so hard to give up, apart from and before the mind shattering withdrawals. To finally have something so deeply needed, to willingly give it up was too much. Demon blood had scorched mouth and throat, the heavy taste of corrupted metal running down and through his veins. It was like a virus, an iron infection feasting on his nerves.

This was not like that.

Demon blood had been hot, threatening to incinerate him from the inside out, until there was nothing left but cracked, blackened bones. This blood… Lucifer's blood was cold.

It shocked him at first. The chill of it bit at his lips, his tongue. It didn't even taste like blood, he realized. It tasted like… like snow. Empty, with only the sharp aftertaste of frost, like stepping out on a winter morning and taking a deep breath.

Sam shivered, the cold creeping into his veins. He was aware of Lucifer's palm against his lips, relatively warm compared to his blood. With the tip of his tongue he could feel the cut scored into the flesh, and wondered dimly what Lucifer had done it with.

Distantly, Sam felt his heart rate slowing, his breathing grow deeper and more even. Demon blood had always made his heart pound, sometimes so hard he would swear his ribs were bruised all along the inside, a cage struggling to contain a heart determined to escape. But this - this was calming him. All of the fear, the apprehension he had felt before was melting away as his veins began to freeze. The ache that demon blood had satisfied was still there, but somehow did not seem to matter as much. Something else was being soothed in him as he continued to drink, something he hadn't even realized was there. The more he drank, the better it felt, the calmer he became.

Something touched his left cheek. With a start, Sam realized it was Lucifer's fingers, curling just enough to graze his skin. Without noticing, Sam had gone from holding Lucifer's hand to his mouth with one of his to clasping it in both, pressing the slashed palm to his lips as he fed hungrily, greedily.

He flung the hand away, horrified, his calm heart suddenly racing. He'd meant only a small taste, enough to satisfy Lucifer's challenge, and he'd… His stomach clenched, the ghostly chill running through him only making him feel more ill. He panted, needing air, needing space, needing to get away.

Lucifer was examining his hand speculatively. He made no advance on him, but that was a long ways away from being a comfort. When his eyes came up, there was a knowing glitter in them. With his unhurt hand, he touched the corner of his mouth significantly.

Sam wiped at his lips with the back of his hand. A bright red streak of blood was left behind. His stomach did another flip. It was a stark reminder: whatever it tasted like, however it made him feel, it was blood he was drinking.

"Alright there, Sammy?" A trace of Lucifer's usual lilt had come back to his tone. "Feeling a little lightheaded, maybe?"

Sam didn't answer. He did feel a little wobbly on his feet, but wasn't about to admit it. He concentrated on staying upright and eyed Lucifer suspiciously. "Now what?"

"Now?" Lucifer took a step towards him, closing the small gap Sam had put between them when he'd come to his senses. "Now is the part when you wake up, and see what happens."

Before Sam had a chance to dodge, before he even knew what Lucifer was doing, his hand flashed up, the tips of two fingers pressing to his forehead just the way Cass had done on occasion. Panic flooded him—

-And he woke up, heart pounding.

The room was dark, silent. The sun had yet to rise, and the digital clock read 3:23 when Sam persuaded his eyes to focus on it. He remained still, automatically trying to sense if there was anyone in the room with him, ears straining for the slightest noise. When nothing presented itself, he sat up and scanned the room.

Nothing.

Sam breathed out, relieved. Nothing had followed him out of his dreams, there was no softly smiling devil waiting for him, no demons watching him in his sleep.

Then he realized what was wrong. He was shivering, uncontrollably, from head to toe. Not from fear, though.

He was absolutely freezing.

…

VIII.

…

There was a world of difference between thinking that Lucifer was nesting in your brain and knowing that he was.

Waking up with a bad case of the chills, by itself, wouldn't have been enough to convince Sam that he was getting visits from the first of the fallen. Even though he had been under all of the covers, dressed, the windows closed and temperate weather outside, shivering wouldn't be enough to have him leaping to those sorts of conclusions.

The thick layer of frost on the inside of all the windows, plus the bathroom mirror, was a little more convincing.

Even with that much evidence, though, Sam wasn't willing to swallow it yet. He busted out his laptop, brushed the dust off his researching skills, and searched for anything that could cause a hard freeze inside a closed motel room. He spent a whole day looking, never once leaving that room, and nothing came up. There were plenty of things that could cause frost, but every one of them came with other signs to look out for. Save for the dream, the frost was all he had.

When he checked the local news – after figuring out where he was – it all came up vanilla. There was nothing newsworthy, let alone supernatural going on within a hundred mile radius, unless one counted record breaking turnip sizes by the local 4-H.

Absence of proof of it being anything else, however, did not make it proof that his freezer morning was the result of Lucifer's blood. It didn't conclusively prove that Lucifer was somehow sneaking into his brain.

He didn't fight sleep when it came. He was saving his energy for the fight he was anticipating with Lucifer in his dreams.

Except that when he 'woke' again, still in the same bed as the night before, the fallen angel was nowhere to be found.

Sam blinked stupidly, unable to process it. Every night before, if he wasn't sitting close by and waiting for Sam to open his eyes, then he was never hard to find, either. He would be near, sitting beside him, at a table, in a backseat, or standing just outside the passenger door or beside the window, gazing out at the restricted landscape of Sam's dream world. Sam wondered sometimes what it was Lucifer could see out there. Whenever Sam looked out he saw the same landscape that had been out there before falling asleep, but if he tried to walk out into it, it would melt away. Did Lucifer see the same paper thin façade of a world as Sam, or was he able to see through it to the bare subconscious that lay beyond it?

Not finding Lucifer there, when he had been a constant for so long, filled Sam with an unexpected panic. If he wasn't here, then where the hell was he?

Sam tore the worn motel room apart, looking for any clue where he could have gone. He even tried to leave the room, to search the false outside world for him, and was met with as much success as he normally was when making such an escape attempt.

Lucifer was nowhere to be found, refused to answer any of his calls. Sam was alone inside his head.

When he woke that morning he was, if anything, less rested than on those nights when his ear had been constantly filled with Lucifer's chatter. He'd spent the whole night, his entire dream, searching for the missing angel, in trying to reason out his abrupt disappearance, and had come up with nothing. What did it mean? Did it have something to do with the blood he had given Sam the night before, was he planning something more? Or had he really been nothing more than a recurring nightmare, plaguing his nights?

He found, though, that he was less inclined to believe that the Lucifer in his dreams was just a figment. He would have thought his absence would make his unreality more likely, only going to prove that his presence before had been nothing but Sam's own mind. But Sam found that he was now accepting his reality as a given. The way he thought of him, trying to understand why he was gone, it all was coming from the assumption that Lucifer was real. It took conscious effort to remember that he might not be.

There was something, something that was a little more tangible that had him thinking of Lucifer as real. It was something subtle, that he had missed the first morning, and when he did notice it he had done his best to deny was there.

He felt better.

He was still tired from not sleeping well and being on the road for weeks, he was still worried about what visions of Lucifer could mean… but he felt better. He was tired, not worn; he was worried, not frantic or paranoid. He felt more at ease than he had been since hitting the road – hell, before hitting the road. It's not as though his life had been a cakewalk before that. The near-compulsive need to keep moving, to put in more miles, to get away was no longer overwhelming everything else. He felt like he could breathe again.

Demon blood had given him a rush, given him power and command, and then when it wore away it left him crashing and weaker than he had been before.

Angel blood, it seemed, did not give the same spike of power. It imparted a quiet kind of strength, shoring up Sam's natural reserves, and soothed his frayed nerves. The more days that passed, all still without any sign of Lucifer returning, the more Sam became convinced that the cautious sense of well-being came from his taste of angel blood.

Lucifer had said that angel blood was clarity. As the days passed, Sam understood what he meant. As the days passed, Sam came, resisting, to a realization that brought back a little of his old anxiety.

He wanted more.

…

IX.

…

"Hello, Sam."

He didn't startle at the soft greeting. He'd known, as soon as he made the almost imperceptible crossing from waking to sleeping that he wasn't alone. More than a week had passed since Lucifer's disappearance, and Sam could still sense the difference before he opened his eyes.

Sam sat up slowly in the bed. Lucifer was sitting on the table nearby, one foot planted in a chair, the other held up close, knee bent. He was watching Sam with relaxed curiosity. He looked, Sam thought, remarkably human sitting there.

"Lucifer."

The angel's eyebrows rose. "Do I take this to mean that you are convinced that I'm not a figment, Sam?"

Sam tossed aside the blanket that was only partially covering him and passed a hand over his face. "Let's say that I think it more likely than not," he muttered. "But I won't forget that you could still just be a dream."

Lucifer smiled. There was no menace in it. "I'm so glad you believe in me, Sam."

Sam scowled, but it had no effect on Lucifer.

For a while, there was nothing but silence. It was strange, if not exactly awkward. He'd grown used to having long, silent dreams of late, but that was because Lucifer had been conspicuously absent. Whenever he had been present, then there was the constant ramble of conversation. To see the man and yet hear nothing was a little disconcerting. Idly, Sam wondered if he would ever have a normal dream again; or at least what passed for normal for him. He wasn't even sure he could remember what they were like.

"Where have you been the last week?"

"Have you missed me?"

Sam scoffed, trying to ignore the almost subconscious affirmation that sprung up at the suggestion. He had missed Lucifer, in a way. The angel had become a fixture in his dreaming world, and without him there had been a very noticeable void. Like losing a tooth, there'd been no way to completely ignore it, and now that the void was filled again there was an undeniable sense of relief.

"When I asked you why you were here," he said evenly, "you said that you had no other choice than to be here, to be with me. You haven't been here. So what changed, and why are you back?"

"Well, I never said 100% that I was leashed to you, Sam. I just suggested that I might be." He grinned an impish grin, appreciating the use of a good loophole. It died away again quickly, though, his face growing serious as he stared at Sam. "Though it is still true. I have been here, Sam. I've simply been giving you some space. I thought you might appreciate it."

"So, what, you've been here all this time, invisible, watching me stew? Is that what I'm supposed to 'appreciate'?"

"No. When I say that I've been giving you space, I mean it. As much as it is possible for me to do so, I have been giving you a wide berth and your privacy. I have not been watching you, listening to you or peering into your thoughts, however tempting it might have been."

"And doing what?" he insisted. "Where have you been this whole time? It's not as though there are a lot of places to go around here."

Lucifer shrugged, looking around the room. The motel room was nearly identical to thousands that had come before it, all so similar that they had become an invisible kind of background in Sam's life. Invisible, but inescapable, as much a cage as any other he had shared with this fallen warrior.

"There is more to this place than might be immediately apparent. I can perceive more because it's not a construct of my own mind. There is more to the dream than a single room and the company of an old friend. I just had to find a spot where meaning was more dense than usual, and slip away, closing the door behind me. Let you have some alone time."

"And do what? What parts of my brain did you get into?"

"I did not a thing to your mind, Sam."

"Then what the hell have you been doing?"

It was difficult to fully interpret the look Lucifer turned on him. It was annoyed, exasperated, maybe, but there was something like pity lurking in his eyes. "Much the same as you, I expect," he said testily. "Thinking. Reflecting. Considering what has gone before and what it could mean for what's to come, how many long held assumptions may have to be rethought. Some of my assumptions have been a part of who I am longer than there has been a human race, so perhaps you can understand why I would feel the need for some alone time as well?"

"That's your excuse, then?"

"It's not an excuse if it's the truth."

Sam shook his head, deciding to give up on the line of questioning for now. He had the distinct impression it would end up being frustratingly circular.

It made him wonder, though, what assumptions Lucifer felt he had to review. It was a little odd to think of Lucifer as even having anything as human-sounding as 'assumptions,' though what he would have in their place instead, Sam didn't know. 'Assumptions,' just made him sound so… fallible.

"Why are we connected?" He was staring out the window, into a sky full of stars that were all in his head, and didn't see Lucifer's reaction to his question. At that moment, he didn't care. "I'm not your vessel any more, you're in the Cage, everything that was meant to come to pass has done already, so why are you still here? For that matter, why were you attached to me in the first place?"

For a minute, Lucifer didn't answer. As the quiet went on, Sam began to think that he would just allow the questions to go unanswered, to pretend that he hadn't heard them. In a way, Sam would have been completely fine with that.

"I don't know, Sam." Lucifer's voice came to him, rawer than he had ever heard it before. "When I… 'rebelled' against my Father, and my brothers and sisters cast me out of Heaven for the sin of disobedience, for having loved too much… I never expected to be given any sort of second chance. I had thought at the time that because what I did was out of love and loyalty, that I would be forgiven even so terrible a crime as disobedience. Perhaps it was a kind of naïveté on my part, but I thought that if my family saw that my 'failing' was all for the love of them, they might forgive me." The table creaked, Lucifer shifting his weight. Sam kept his eyes averted, understanding that it would be easier to speak if Lucifer felt he were speaking only to air. He'd heard this story before, but there was something new underlying the words, and he wanted to hear it.

"But they weren't forgiving. I was cast out, and there was rejoicing at my punishment. But even then, there was a prophesy that I would escape, that there would be another war between Heaven and Hell. Everyone seemed to just accept it at face value; it was the Word of our Father, after all, and no angel had reason to doubt Him, not even the Fallen. I didn't doubt it, at first. I was angry, and determined to have some sort of retribution, and His saying that it was a certainty I would escape… Well, it just seemed to me He was admitting to an inevitability. It didn't occur to me until much later that if anyone had the power to prevent me, it was Him; that if He wished for there to be no war, all He had to do was kill me, rather than imprison me. By giving such a prophesy, He was also giving a promise.

"There was a lot of time to think in my Cage," he said quietly. "And I did think. I thought about what it could mean for my Father to give such a promise, to give me this chance to tear down what He had created. In all the millennia I spent there, I came to think of Him as every kind of being: mad, over confidant, self-defeating, taunting, until I finally began to think of Him as nothing at all. I could not understand what it was He wanted to achieve by it all, if He had planned for everything beforehand – including my rebellion. The best I could think was that it was some sort of test, to see if His creation could withstand itself, or to see what would happen if He just let it run wild. It wasn't a happy inference. It reduced us all to pieces in a complex game of His devising. And what game master could ever love the pieces on His board?"

Sam said nothing. It all sounded very close in his own thoughts, the crisis of faith that he had gone through not so long ago, but underwritten with a deeper kind of pain. This was a personal betrayal for Lucifer, were it true. This was family that had used him as a pawn, manipulated him into his actions, pretending to love while only caring for their experiment. Not for the first time, Sam felt the similarities between them, linking them together like fine chains.

"And then I met you."

Sam blinked, almost looked over at Lucifer's unexpected words.

"From the moment I was cast down from Heaven, was shoved into that stinking Cage to stew, He intended that I would get out again. He knew that I would need a vessel. By promising my release, He was also promising me you." The creak of wood as Lucifer shifted again. "He may have intended it as another test, to see if this bond between us could somehow redeem me… but I think it was His purpose that we be linked. Be that fate, destiny, or the machinations of an interfering old man."

Still staring out the window, Sam frowned, mind racing. How would he have been meant to redeem Lucifer? His crime was more than just 'loving too much.' He hated humans. He'd never made any secret of that, it was the root of why he had been cast out. How could Sam, one of those reviled creatures, possibly redeem him?

"Some rebel you are," he said, finally looking at Lucifer again. "The first angel to show free will, buying into destiny?"

Lucifer looked surprised. Then he smiled self-depreciatingly and nodded, as though conceding the point.

"And what about you?" he asked, looking around himself pointedly. "I notice we're still in the same rundown corner of nowhere as we were the last time we spoke. Decided to stop running, Sam?"

He shrugged. "Maybe, for now."

"Interesting that you choose to stop at the same time you decide the voices in your head are real. I honestly don't know whether to be charmed or insulted."

"It could be that I'm just tired. I'm human, it happens."

"Are you tired?" Sam didn't respond right away to that, and Lucifer's demeanor abruptly became more interested. "How have you been feeling, Sam, since we last met?"

It would have been nice to say yes, to just admit to being very human and mortal and needing some real rest. If he said it he might just convince himself it was true. He had been tired, before. It was so ingrained, the feeling of being exhausted, like his whole being was ground down into the dust, that it was getting hard to notice when it was worse than usual. But he had known. He had been so much more exhausted, perhaps more than he had ever been, that it was a wonder he could still move on at all. He suspected that it was only because he was afraid of the ache, the pain that came with memory that threatened to overtake him should he stop for even a moment, that he had never slowed down before. He had been tired, but it was more effort to remain still than it was to keep going.

But he knew better. He hadn't stopped running because he was too tired to keep going. In the last week he had gotten more rest than he had in months before. And as he had already observed, however grudgingly, he felt more at ease now than he had in a long time.

But no one said he had to admit to that if Lucifer asked.

"How am I meant to be feeling? You're the angel; you ought to know what effect a dose of angel blood would have."

"I have a good idea, but no guarantees. Do you know how many humans have ever drunk of the blood of an angel?" He didn't wait for a response. "One. And that's you, Sam. I know what should have happened, but there is sometimes a difference between theory and practice, isn't there?"

Sam felt a surge of anger, the first since waking into this dream, surprisingly. "So you were using me as a guinea pig, to see how humans handle angel juice?"

"It wouldn't harm you, Sam. That much I know for certain. I couldn't, or perhaps more to the point, I wouldn't ever harm you. I've told you that."

"Never harm me?" Lucifer's reassurances did not dissipate his anger. If anything it grew, the memory of helpless frustration when Lucifer had possessed him rising up and choking him. "Right, 'never harm me.' That's exactly what you weren't doing when you had me personally torture people I knew, when you tried to kill Dean, when you were hell bent on taking down your brother and then Heaven and the entire human race. Did it ever occur to you that I might consider that to be 'harm'? Or let's be a little more direct. How about all the time we spent in the Cage, the torture you inflicted there? If that's not considered harm, then nothing is. Did losing your little game with Michael invalidate your promises, or were they always conditional on you getting your own way?"

The look Lucifer leveled on him was as near to horrified as Sam had ever seen. Across the distance of the room, Sam could make out the blue of his eyes, light and bright, fixated on his face, searching. Sam did not look away.

Finally Lucifer broke the stare, exhaling sharply. He spoke to the floor. "The Cage was designed to hold me for eternity, or near enough. It was never meant for humans to experience, let alone endure, or understand." He shook his head. "I don't expect you to believe me, but I never lied to you. I never have and never will, and I never harmed you in the Cage."

It was such a blatant, bald faced lie that Sam had to keep himself from laughing hysterically. "I have my memories back from that time. I remember what happened in the Cage."

"And memory is infallible," Lucifer shot back.

"I don't think nearly two centuries in Hell is anything I'm likely to forget."

"I don't doubt it. But ask yourself this: how much of your memory can you believe? You remember your experiences there, but you remember them subjectively, through the filter of you perceptions." Lucifer was looking him in the eye again, and Sam felt a wash of déjà vu. This was something he had experienced before, Lucifer holding his eye with this intensity, as though trying to convince him, or hold him steady in a chaotic tossing. "What use would be physical torture on a being that has no body?" he asked, his voice low, reasonable… convincing. "The Cage was for me, to punish me for my defiance. The torments of that place go beyond pain of the flesh, and are wreaked equally on any being caught inside it. You experienced torture reserved for an archangel. Do you really think that everything – anything you remember really happened?"

Sam shook his head. What Lucifer said, what he was suggesting, had never occurred before, and he didn't like the implications. If he couldn't trust his own memory, his own mind, then what could he trust? Was that the root of the punishment Lucifer meant, picking apart your mind until you were left wondering how much of your past and self were really real?

If that were true, and that was the Hell Lucifer had experienced since his Fall… was that why he insisted he would never lie to Sam?

He shook his head again. No. It was all lies. Lies and more lies, it had to be.

Sam decided to leave Hell and the Cage alone, refocus on what they had been discussing before. "And when you know what angel blood does to humans, what then? You plan to begin an angel blood addict army?"

Lucifer made an impatient noise. "What is the point of asking me anything when you refuse to believe the answers I give?" he grumbled. "No, Sam. I am not planning on flooding Earth with hordes of blood-addled humans. If you stopped to think about it for yourself you would see some very good reasons why that wouldn't work."

"Such as?"

"Impracticality, for a start." Lucifer sounded mildly disgusted. "Even if every angel alive were behind me, which is not the case, there is no way we would be able to reach the numbers we would need in the time before someone clever found a way to undo it all. On my own, it only becomes more impossible. And even if we did manage to create an army, what good would they be?" The disgust in Lucifer's tone strengthened a little, joined by derision. It was his usual tone when Lucifer spoke about humans. "You can feel for yourself, Sam; angel blood bestows no particular powers. They would only be humans, and humans alone would be of no use in a celestial war. If I were even interested in a war anymore." He shook himself, as though to shake off clinging, unpleasant thoughts. "All of which is moot. Unlike demon blood, the blood of an angel is not addictive."

Then why do I want more?

He swallowed hard, trying not to think about it. It had been something he had slowly come to understand over the week Lucifer had been absent - that he craved a second taste of Lucifer's blood. It didn't burn and demand as the cravings for demon blood had done, filling his mind with red, pounding throbs, but the angel blood itself hadn't burned, either. Instead it crept quietly into his thoughts, reminding him of the taste, the feel, the coldness, until Sam would realize that it was all he had been thinking of for over an hour.

He was thinking of it now. He tore his gaze from the steady, hypnotizing throb at the base of Lucifer's throat.

Sam turned his head away from the sight that drew and disgusted him at once, from Lucifer's eyes that watched him, that knew him. He stared at the wall instead, at the ugly wallpaper and uglier framed prints and did his best to block out his awareness of Lucifer.

It wasn't like the craving of demon blood, where he could practically taste it on his lips, feel it running down his throat, the need for it a building pressure whose only relief was to track down a demon and drain them dry. It wasn't like the hunger he assumed vampires went through, basic and primal and inexorable, their very survival dependant on the hunt and feeding on their prey.

It wasn't a drug. It wasn't food. The absence of it didn't set his nerves on fire or leave a yawning hunger in the pit of his stomach. It was a quiet, almost cold craving. If he were still, he thought he could hear Lucifer's pulse, an understated reminder of what lay so close at hand, of what could be his if he were just to ask.

Perhaps that was the most frightening thing of all, he thought. He could have what it was that he wanted so much; all he had to do was ask. Lucifer wouldn't deny him, of that much he was certain. He wouldn't refuse Sam a second taste… and he didn't even think that it was because indulging in Sam's craving played into any malevolent plans.

He couldn't see Lucifer the way he had seen those demons – as walking containers meant to be torn open and drunk. Nor could he think of him as prey to be hunted down. Nor again could he think of Lucifer the way he had always thought of him before: A scheming monster, bent on using him up for his own evil purposes, till there was nothing left.

He couldn't quite believe that was true anymore. He wasn't sure when that had changed, when he had decided that Lucifer appearing in his dreams wasn't a part of some elaborate setup, some attempt at revenge. Maybe it was during those nine days of silence, when all he'd had to do was think. Maybe it was in the last hour, as he listened to Lucifer speak. Maybe it was because of the way he was looking at Sam.

Maybe it was the cold pulse throbbing in his ears.

Still refusing to look back at Lucifer, Sam swallowed, forced himself to focus. "So, what happens now?"

"Now?"

"Yeah, now. Is this something that I can look forward to enjoying for the rest of my life, will you be disappearing for good, what? What is happening… now?"

"What do you want to happen now, Sam?" There was a pause, Lucifer waiting for some kind of reply. When it was obvious none was forthcoming, he went on. "Is this kind of life the one you want, driving from one dive motel to the next, with no destination, no plan? I know you've always hated the hunter life – or at least you've always said that you have – but aimless wandering has never seemed your style. You could always settle down, have the life that you wanted before you were dragged back out on the road. Go back to school, find a girl, get married, and get a house with a nice normal mortgage and start churning out little Winchesters. If you do it right you might be able to leave the old life behind for good."

"And what, have you riding along in my head during this nice, normal life?" he snapped. For some reason, even though Lucifer was making no attempt to mock this image he was conjuring up, it pissed Sam off. It had been his dream life, to have the cookie-cutter normality so many others were ought to despise. Occasionally that dream had been obscured by the need for revenge or a self-destructive crusade, but that longing had never fully subsided. And for some reason hearing it out loud made him angry, like it was an attack.

Out of the very edge of his peripheral vision Sam could see Lucifer shrug his shoulders. "If that's what you want, Sam. Really, it's always been about what you want, your choices. It's always been about whether you say yes or—"

Sam's fist connected with Lucifer's cheek, sending the angel on a short, ungraceful flight to the floor, the chair his foot had been resting on caught up and dragged with him. Lucifer landed in a tangled heap of limbs and metal.

Sam stood over him, ready for any retaliation, his breath coming in and out in harsh gasps. He didn't even remember jumping to his feet, crossing the distance, letting his fist fly. The rage he could remember, though, sudden and hot, clouding his vision and choking his breath.

The rage he didn't need to remember.

"My choice?" he spat, watching as Lucifer began untangling himself from the chair. "My choice? You're seriously going to sit there and feed me that crap? You might have needed a 'yes' before you could hop in my meat suit, but it was never about what I wanted. It was only a rule, one that you couldn't break to get what you wanted, so you made it seem like a choice." He scoffed. "Even then, some choice it was. Free will mixed with the inevitability of fate."

Lucifer stood, brushing himself off before turning to face Sam again. When he did Sam swallowed, his palms going clammy. A thin trickle of blood escaped the right side of Lucifer's mouth, running down to his chin, his teeth lightly stained with red when he spoke. "That's all the choice any of us are given. We're all bound by fate, even angels. I was just being honest, like I said I always would be with you."

"No!" Sam balled his fists so tightly his knuckles throbbed. Those of his right hand were lanced over with fire and he knew they must have split when he punched Lucifer. "You're saying it's all decided, all of it, before we're even born? That what we choose, it's all been planned ahead of time, and nothing we do matters at all?"

Lucifer was eerily calm. He made no move to wipe the blood from his lips or chin, and kept his hands loose, his blue eyes clear as they watched him. "What we do matters, Sam," he said quietly. "Of course it does, or there would be no meaning to anything. But what we do is also predetermined. It's what we wish that doesn't matter. Struggle and spin all you want, it's all the same."

Sam had the distance between them covered again before he consciously thought about it, only instead of punching him, this time he had the fallen angel shoved back against the wall. In some part of Sam's mind it registered that laying his hands on such a powerful creature was a colossally bad move. He ignored that part of his brain and thanked his lucky stars that Lucifer wasn't fighting back.

"You don't believe that," he hissed into Lucifer's placid face. "You don't believe that all we do is predetermined. If you did, then what would be the point of anything? The rebellion, the war, what would be the point if you believed that everything you did was a part of some grand master plan that you had no control over? Why kill your brothers if you knew that you would lose?"

Something finally flickered in Lucifer's eyes. Regret, pain, anger, they all raced over his face before settling on the anger and focusing on Sam. "I never wanted to kill them—"

"But what?" Sam cut in. "What you wanted didn't matter, but your actions were a foregone conclusion? You killed them because you had to? What kind of crock is that, what kind of brother kills his family to make a point?"

Lucifer bared his teeth at Sam. They were still stained with blood, whatever cut in his mouth had yet to stop bleeding. Sam did his best to not fix his eyes on the red.

"What we want and what has to be done very rarely coincide," he growled. He still kept his hands at his sides, but Sam could feel the other man's muscles tensing under his hands. His head tilted to the side, a corner of his mouth twitched. "And who is to say that the 'grand master plan' won't work out in my favor in the end?"

"What?"

"Something I did learn from watching humanity for untold millennia," he smiled. "You never know until you try."

Sam raised his fist again, Lucifer's shirt gripped tight in the other to keep him from ducking. Lucifer didn't duck. Before Sam could swing, Lucifer caught his wrist in a grip that was more than enough to remind Sam that he was an angel. "C'mon, Sam, you know this game. It's a game of rules and expectations set by senile old men who think they know it all. The point is to figure out how to bend them, or get them to work to your advantage." The grip tightened further, making Sam wince in pain. "Our actions have meaning; they lead us to our fates. If you want to give them more meaning, then you don't do them because some father or God tells you to. You do it because it's what you want."

The pressure on his wrist eased slightly, just enough so it was no longer painful.

"What is it that you want, Sam?"

Sam's eye fell to the thin red trail that led from the corner of Lucifer's mouth and through the rough stubble along his chin. He couldn't help looking, and once there, he couldn't turn away. It was already beginning to darken a little, to dry. Sam found his gaze drawn further up to fix on Lucifer's mouth, the source of the trail and where it still glistened with wetness.

What was it he wanted? A hunter's life, full of danger and horror, doing good work that would ultimately lead to nothing much but a shallow grave?

Lucifer still held on to his wrist, so he transferred his grip from Lucifer's shirt to the angel's throat. He didn't squeeze, but he made it clear he wasn't going to let go any time soon.

A normal life. Was that what he wanted? School loans, a house, a family and football on Sundays; just lose himself in routine and mediocrity and pretend he didn't know about the things that hid in the dark?

Lucifer swallowed, his Adam's apple bobbing beneath Sam's palm. He watched Sam closely, betraying no sign of anxiety, only curiosity.

And empty life, no destination, no plan, only knowing he had to keep moving, because to stop was to let the past catch up with and overtake him… was that what he wanted?

Beneath his hand Sam could feel something else; the scratchiness of stubble, the subtle cords of muscle… the strong, steady beat of a pulse and the weird, incongruous chill seeping into his hand. He could feel the blood moving under his palm, alive but cold.

What did he want?

The stubble on Lucifer's chin was rough against his tongue. There was a drop of blood under his jaw that had been hidden from his eye but which fell to his tongue, cold and coppery. It was older blood, and didn't taste of snow and frost. Not allowing himself to think of what he was doing, Sam went higher, following the blood trail, cleaning it away as he went.

Lucifer remained completely still, not uttering a word of either protest or mockery. With his hand clamped on his throat, the only changes Sam noticed in him were a sharp inhale and the pulse under his hand quickening.

Sam came to the end of the trail, to the corner of Lucifer's mouth, and stopped. He pulled back slowly. He didn't want to see Lucifer's expression, to see what might be written on his face now, if it was amusement, triumph… At the same time, there was no way he could stop himself from looking.

Lucifer watched him, his eyes half-lidded. For a moment that was all the more expression he gave, seemingly waiting for some other move from Sam. When none came, his lips parted, showing Sam the traces of red that still stained his teeth, his tongue. Sam's eyes were drawn, while his mind screamed at him why this was every kind of wrong. Sam ignored it.

Before Sam could act on the half-formed idea reluctantly taking shape, Lucifer's mouth snapped shut. Smirking, his mouth worked. There was a small crunch, Lucifer winced, and almost before Sam could realize what he had done, his lips parted again.

It was dark and red inside, shining with blood. It coated his teeth, his gums and tongue in a thick layer. Lucifer smiled a bloody smile.

"Take what you want, Sam."

Ignoring the voice in his head, Sam followed the one of the devil.

He ran his tongue along Lucifer's lower lip, where the blood was already beginning to pool, threatening to spill over onto the floor. Sam lapped up the freezing drops and shivered. It was so different from demon blood, and yet in a way the first relief of a second taste was the same.

Sam cleaned the lower lip completely, and then licked at the upper. There wasn't much compared to the lower, and the tip of his tongue touched Lucifer's teeth. Sam froze. There was more blood there, further inside. Lucifer's lips remained parted, as open an invitation as anyone could want, his icy breaths washing over Sam's mouth. He realized with a start that his own mouth was hanging open, his breath too labored. Somehow the hand at Lucifer's throat had moved without his conscious command, changed from a claw at the front to an open grip at the back, cupping around his neck to keep him from backing away.

Seeing Sam's hesitation and divining where it came from, Lucifer licked his lips. The motion recoated them with a layer of crimson. Bloody lips smirked at him, blue eyes practically sparkled.

Sam repeated the procedure for cleaning Lucifer's lips, licking, scraping them with his teeth to be sure he didn't lose a single bit.

When Lucifer's lips were as clean as they were going to get for a second time, Sam went to move back, but was stopped. Abruptly there was a hand at the back of his neck, holding him in place the exact way he was holding Lucifer. He was allowed to back only far enough to break contact and no more.

Inches away, Lucifer studied him minutely. Then Sam felt a cold touch on his still parted lips. Lucifer, who had remained impassive throughout, was taking action.

Sam felt the blood-slicked tongue pass over his lips, his teeth, and flicked over his own. Sam shivered, his mouth flooded with liquid frost and Lucifer. It was no conscious act to close his mouth around the invading tongue, to accept what Lucifer offered - or to follow it back, to quest out more blood, more frost, more Lucifer.

At some point Lucifer let go of his wrist, looped his arm around Sam's waist and pulled him close. It seemed easier to go along than to resist, and the new position made everything more comfortable.

He didn't notice when Lucifer's mouth ceased to bleed, when Lucifer no longer tasted of frost, when his trembling no longer had anything to do with chills, or when the cold was entirely replaced with heat. Lucifer only pulled him closer, teeth sharp at Sam's lips. Sam let himself be pulled, pressing into Lucifer more, pushing the angel against the wall.

Sam no longer wondered what it was he wanted. He knew, and he took all that was offered.

He was not left wanting.

…

X.

…

When the sun was in the sky, Sam drove. He still had no destination, but it was no longer a matter of putting as much road behind him as was possible. He cruised along the interstate rather than tore. The vague feeling that something was following him, nipping at his heels and ready to take him in its jaws if it should catch up slowly faded, until Sam could actually see the road in front of him.

He wasn't running anymore. Not from his past, not from his memories, and not from his dreams.

No. He wasn't running from his dreams.

When the sun began to dip down towards the horizon, Sam sought out motels with their neon VACANCY signs lit up. He didn't fight sleep, or push his wakefulness until he was seeing double and couldn't fight it anymore.

He would see Lucifer, and unlike any time before when there would be talk almost from the moment Sam opened his eyes in the dream until he was allowed to wake, now there was none. Not a word passed between them, and for that Sam was inordinately grateful. In general he was one for talk, to vent or to clarify what needed clarifying, but in this case he wanted as little insight to his actions as he could get away with. His time with Lucifer… he just wanted it to remain action, no contemplation. Not now, perhaps not ever.

It always began with blood.

Sam would come into the dream to find Lucifer waiting for him. He wouldn't say a word. It was understood that to speak would break whatever… 'understanding' they had arrived at.

No, he would not say a word, but he would smile. He would look at Sam in a way that told him he knew what was going on inside his head, even if Sam refused to acknowledge it himself. Then with that smile still in place, he would open a single gash on his palm, or tear one into his cheek with his teeth, or would simply hand Sam a short knife – his knife – and stand with his shirts off, his arms spread, inviting Sam to choose what, where and how much.

It always began with blood, but never ended the same way. It always began cold, and ended in a furnace.

Sam didn't think about it. He didn't argue with himself, just did whatever it was that he wanted. If he thought, then he would have to think of it as Lucifer winning, that he had been tricked into acting against his better judgment, and that this was all according to some scheme.

He didn't think it was a scheme.

He was indulging in a craving. Lucifer said the blood wasn't addictive, but he did crave it, its searing coldness running through his veins, cold enough to raise gooseflesh and to make his joints ache. It was what he wanted, what he came back for night after night.

If he allowed himself to think, he might realize that it wasn't only the blood he craved, but the danger it came wrapped in as well. It might occur to him that it wasn't just the cold or the heat that he wanted, but the experience of going from one to the other.

If he thought, then he might notice that the need for blood was becoming less with each night, while the need for Lucifer never subsided.

…

XI.

…

Sam turned the blade over in his hands. Light cast from a single lamp caught along its sharpened edge and was thrown into his eyes.

It was a familiar tool, the handle felt good in the palm of his hand. It wasn't the demon blade, but a much plainer knife, one used for the non-demon kind of hack and slash. It was one of the very few things he hadn't left behind in the cabin. He might have been leaving the hunter behind, but it was still a dangerous world out there, and only a fool would believe that just because they stopped looking for trouble, that trouble couldn't find them. Sam had worked the edge into this knife himself. He'd cleaned it of gore hundreds of times, kept it close to hand; it had saved him more times than he would care to count.

He looked up from the blade to the one who had handed it to him.

Lucifer stood in the middle of the room, bare from the waist up, arms held slightly to the sides, palms forward. He was watching Sam as he studied the knife, not a trace of impatience about him, a faint smile pulling at his lips. He was breathing easily, his pulse – which Sam was still all too aware of – was steady.

It was the beginning of one of their more deliberate nights. As soon as Sam had appeared, Lucifer had made it very clear that he would defer to anything Sam wanted. He hadn't spoken, of course, not a syllable. But as Sam watched he had begun to strip, removing first his gray button up, then his khaki green tee. Those removed, he had stood for a few long moments, making no move, his face betraying nothing. But there being this undeniable knowing in his eyes as he stared at Sam. The knowing of what was to some next, the knowing of what would inevitably come later, and the knowing of just how much of the ritual was justification for the rest.

Staring Lucifer in the eye and understanding all of this, Sam had felt his heart give a few hard beats. He might not want to face the truth, but Lucifer had no such qualms. It was another way of his being honest; he wouldn't lie to Sam, even when Sam was doing it to himself. The closest he came was with his silence.

He'd handed Sam the knife, picking it up from where it lay on the table by its blade, and offering up the hilt. He was never in control of the weapon, never a threat, and very deliberately bestowing that control to Sam.

Sam looked again from the knife in his hand to Lucifer.

He had done this before. He had taken the edge of his blade to Lucifer's flesh, marked him with shallow cuts that allowed him to drink the ice cold blood. He was usually conservative. One or two moderately deep cuts would give a steady flow, and he would be sated for the night. Only once had he cut deep, so deep that he'd been unable to keep up with the flow or to finish it off. That wound had continued to bleed long after Sam could drink no more. Lucifer had only grunted when the knife had bit, and been particularly lethargic when Sam was finished. If he had been human, Sam had small doubt that he would have bled out completely.

Despite the control Sam was being given, and all of the very good reasons he could think of to take full advantage of it, that was the worst of the damage he had ever inflicted on Lucifer. All it would take was a reversal of his grip on the hilt and he could plunge the blade straight into the fallen angel's heart. It might not kill him, but it would be a start.

But he never did. Cuts were always few, shallow, and – something Sam couldn't deny – relatively gentle. He doubted that Lucifer would resist an attack if it ever came, but the fact was that it never did. Sam acted purely on his desires here, and as much as it should be, killing Lucifer was not something that he wanted.

Looking at Lucifer now, it came to him that tonight the routine was going to change, because those wants had.

He stood up from the bed, still holding the gleaming knife in his hand. In the dim light Lucifer's body was cast into a shadowy landscape of lines and planes. More than half of him was hidden in the dark, but even so Sam could see on one side of his throat where the pulse sped up a fraction. His face remained impassive. Sam reversed his grip on the hilt and the pulse picked up again, Lucifer's eyes flicking down and up again quickly. That was all the more response he gave to the subtle, wordless threat. His body remained open, his face neutral, the knowing still looking back out from his eyes.

Sam let a few moments pass in silence, unmoving. In a way, this was a way of offering some control back to Lucifer, giving him opportunity to act, to rescind what he had offered. He was giving Lucifer a chance to back out.

Lucifer didn't move.

Sam stepped closer. Lucifer had to raise his eyes to keep them trained on Sam, otherwise he remained perfectly still.

Standing over him, Sam studied Lucifer's face. He had never known what kind of man it was that Lucifer had chosen as a temporary vessel, his 'Plan B.' There had never been opportunity, or reason to. He found himself wondering now. What kind of man had he been to accept Lucifer into him, to say 'yes' to the devil himself? It would have been easy to think that he had been an evil man, ready to say yes to the devil because it was already in his nature to do so. It would have been easy to think so, but Sam doubted it. Whatever the cynics might say, experience had taught him that there were comparatively few truly evil people in the world. They were just people, which might make them shallow, stupid, weak and scared, but not necessarily evil.

This man didn't look evil. He looked… average. A plain gold band on his right hand, working jeans, more than a day's stubble over cheeks and chin, vertical lines already set into the skin of his forehead, deep set eyes with the beginnings of crow's feet at the corners… he even had the very beginnings of a pot belly softening the lines of a body that had been trained and muscular when it had been younger. He looked like a young working class family man, a man who might have been his neighbor in Kansas; a far cry from the Adversary of the Bible, the source of all that was evil. Why had he said yes to Lucifer?

Had he regretted it?

Sam raised the knife over his head and brought it down with all of his strength.

Lucifer didn't flinch, didn't once look away from Sam's eyes, not even to look where the knife now stood, embedded deeply into the table.

Sam didn't think. He didn't hesitate. He took what he wanted, what was offered so freely.

He took hold of the back of Lucifer's neck and pulled him forward into a kiss. There was no blood, no fight to sink in his teeth to provide such an excuse, the excuse he had needed before and which Lucifer had always provided. There was only Lucifer, the feel and smell and taste of him, the only hint of frost in his breath as it fluttered over Sam's cheek.

For a moment Lucifer froze. This wasn't the ritual, and they both knew it. For an instant, Sam thought he would stay frozen, would refuse to respond at all if the ritual wasn't followed—

A pair of strong, bare arms wrapped around Sam, crushing him closer, closing those final inches and pressing their bodies together, one hot, one cold. If Sam had thought Lucifer might be less responsive without the ritual of blood, that was fully disproved within moments. He was more voracious than he had ever been, nipping at Sam's tongue, at his lips, all without breaking the skin, without drawing blood. Sam was just as eager, the fingers of one hand carding into Lucifer's reddish hair, the other tracing the familiar lines along his back, down his spine, to the waist of his jeans.

Lucifer was less patient than Sam. His hands dove down low, squeezed both sides of his ass while pulling their hips flush with each other. Sam groaned, his body already beginning to respond. This wasn't the first time they had played this game; Lucifer knew a good number of his buttons. Such as the spot where thigh met ass cheek, when it was being squeezed or kneaded like it was right now. Sam clenched his teeth against another groan and buried his nose into Lucifer's short, soft hair, breathing in the scent of cheap shampoo.

Sam had begun this, and Lucifer was more than willing to continue. He pulled away long enough to tug Sam out of the single white tee shirt he had fallen asleep in, leaving him in nothing but a pair of boxers. There were advantages to being in the same clothes in a dream as you had last been in while awake.

The rough enthusiasm that had driven Lucifer a moment before seemed to evaporate. Abruptly he became gentle, methodical as he ran his fingers along the defining lines of muscle groups, along the curves of his ribs, around the pattern of his tattoo, across each twisted line and divot of scar tissue. Lucifer paid special attention to his scars, mouthing over each, running his tongue along every mark left on his body over the years. There were a lot of them, and Lucifer took his time, gradually working his way further and further down Sam's body until he was kneeling in front of him.

Sam's breathing was a little unsteady as Lucifer worked his tented boxers down from around his hips, off of his legs and tossed them away. He lost any semblance of a steady in-out rhythm for his lungs when Lucifer took him in his mouth and began a similar pattern.

The blood that ran through Lucifer's veins was cold, as was his breath, and to a lesser degree his skin. The inside of his mouth was warm.

Sam's teeth almost creaked under the pressure they were under, but he couldn't completely stop the small noises that were escaping him - the muted grunts, the pleasured sighs. Lucifer worked on him the way he had learned was the best, by keeping a firm grip on the backs of his thighs, kneading the flesh as his mouth moved up and down around Sam. It was effective, and it wasn't long before Sam was having trouble remaining on his feet.

When Lucifer gave no sign at all of letting up on his treatment, Sam pushed the issue and dragged the man back up to his feet by his shoulder. He came up reluctantly, his hands straying to the front as though the finish the task he'd started with his mouth.

Lucifer was still in his high rise jeans, and that was unacceptable when Sam was standing completely bare.

As Sam's hand worked its way into his jeans and slowly began to stroke him, Lucifer's eyes closed, his lips parting ever so slightly. What little softness had remained in Lucifer's cock rapidly disappeared until he was moving slightly, in time with Sam's fist, the tip of his tongue caught between his teeth. The confines of the jeans, even unzipped all the way, were becoming too constricting, though.

Moving rapidly, Sam removed the angel's jeans and his underwear, while he was at it. Thankfully Lucifer wasn't wearing shoes, so he didn't have those to contend with as well.

Both standing bare, he turned Lucifer around so he was facing away from him, so he could continue the hand job from a much more comfortable position. Here the curve of Lucifer's back fit snugly against him, his chill back warming quickly when it came into contact with Sam. He ass pressed back against him, and as tempted as he was, Sam ignored it as best he could. Resting his chin on one of Lucifer's shoulders and holding him steady with his left arm across his chest, Sam stroked and tugged at his erection.

When he turned his head and bit at Lucifer's throat, the angel cried out for the first time, a wordless little sound of surprise. Sam didn't bite hard enough to break the skin, but neither did he let go. He held on with his teeth, just shy of drawing blood, and Lucifer responded by beginning to buck into his hand. His own hands, which were at mostly a loss with no way to reach Sam, had looped back to grab at Sam's thighs, alternately bracing himself or pulling Sam closer.

Sam needed no real encouragement. With Lucifer actively pumping into Sam's hand, he was also pressing himself back against his cock, which was still ready. He moved himself with Lucifer, careful to keep everything separate for now. He wanted nothing more than to have Lucifer bent over and filled with him, to ride the angel so hard that he left his fingerprints in whatever he decided to hold on to, but it was a want that he was denying; or at least, delaying.

As expected, Lucifer quickly became frustrated with Sam's refusal to continue along their expected patterns.

With a sound of disgust, he made Sam let go and turned to face him again. Whatever he planned next was cut short when Sam caught his mouth for a second time, holding his face with both hands.

In a way, this was worse than any craving for blood, angel or demon. With either of them it was a matter of having a craving and then finding a way to satisfy it, which was inevitably to feed it. This need, this craving for Lucifer, it never seemed to abate. He fed the craving, tried to fill the ache, and all he wanted was more, more, more. How was he meant to satisfy this hunger when it felt as though he could partake of the angel for days and still need more?

He didn't notice that he was being walked backwards in small steps until the edge of a seat touched the backs of his legs. Startled, and Lucifer suddenly pressing him down, Sam sat.

He had enough time to register that he was sitting in one of the motel's uncomfortable metal and vinyl cushioned dining chairs, an unfortunate throwback to the 70's, before Lucifer was settling himself into Sam's lap, straddling him for a ride.

This was unexpected. This was different.

Lucifer kept a firm grip on Sam's shoulders, as though to prevent him from rising. Sam made no such attempt, but leaned back as far as the chair would permit as Lucifer lowered himself slowly onto Sam. He had to bite his lip and keep a white-knuckle grip on the edge of his seat to keep himself still as Lucifer came down. Somehow Lucifer kept from making any sort of noise whatsoever, his face calm save for a single vertical line between his brows. Somehow, seeing him look so placid made it more difficult for Sam to keep his hips unmoving, to keep from thrusting up and making the fallen angel show something.

Sam kept himself under control, and after an eternity Lucifer was fully in his lap, fully filled. Sam's breathing was rough compared to Lucifer's, but he wasn't entirely steady, either. In the semi-light, he could see other signs on the angel, blown pupils, a light glisten of sweat over his chest and down his shoulders… the bruise developing on the left side of his neck in the shape of Sam's teeth.

If he had allowed himself to think, he knew he would wonder at the insanity of this.

If he had allowed himself to think, he might have thought Lucifer was beautiful.

Then Lucifer began to move, and any semblance of thought was driven away completely.

The fallen angel rocked and twisted himself in Sam's lap, steadily raising himself up to come back down again. Sam hissed when he clenched himself around Sam on one particular rise, letting go of his vise grip on the chair to transfer to Lucifer's hip, his thumb digging into a bony point. Lucifer grunted, and after coming back down hard onto Sam's lap, repeated the maneuver. Sam almost cursed, hips twisting as best they could in the chair.

Lucifer continued his technique of clenching around Sam on every rise, so Sam took to raking his nails down Lucifer's body, across his chest, belly, arms, back, anything he could reach. Lucifer groaned, his skin crisscrossed with long red lines. Lucifer then took hold of the edges of the chair, exactly as Sam had done, and pulled himself down, forcing more of Sam into him. Sam gripped his hips and held him in place as he rocked and bucked. Lucifer took fistfuls of Sam's hair and set his teeth to his throat.

It was rough, uncoordinated, with a slightly frantic edge. The need to have more of Lucifer and to have him at his mercies only grew, blanking out coherent thought, chasing away any plan his overheated brain tried to put together.

Before long all he could do was hold on to Lucifer, pulling him close while he clawed aimlessly along his back, his teeth digging into whatever bit of flesh was nearest. His breath was unsteady, matching the rest of his body's movements, and he thought he might even be moaning in bursts as he came close to his end.

Lucifer was given to whimpering. It never failed to surprise him, as Lucifer's short, sporadic breaths came out in small whines as he too came close, as his rhythm was lost in the almost desperate frenzy of near-climax.

The angel came first, half rising from his seat and pressing back down as hard as possible, his erection held tight in Sam's hand. Sam wasn't far behind, bucking up spasmodically, a half shout escaping him in his throes.

Exhausted, Sam fell back again the back rest of the chair, one arm still wrapped around Lucifer's waist, dragging him with. Lucifer gave a small grunt of surprise, but Sam was too tired to open his eyes to see his expression. Instead he moved his other arm out from between them and draped it heavily over the angel's shoulders. After a few moments, he felt Lucifer relax into the position. Sam was glad, and let himself relax as well, his face nuzzled into the crook of Lucifer's shoulder.

Strange, he thought to himself, but just now he didn't think he wanted anything in the world. Not blood, not revenge, not escape… nothing. He finally felt sated, and as close to content as he could remember being in a long time. Listening to the gradually slowing beat of Lucifer's heart, to his ragged breathing as it softened, he wondered how long it would be before he felt this way again.

"Sam?"

He jumped, coming out of his doze abruptly. Lucifer had spoken, for the first time since… since this had begun weeks ago. It broke the silently agreed upon rule. Dread rose up in Sam's throat. What would this mean?

"Sam." It wasn't a question now, and he was trying, gently, to pull back from Sam's hold. Feeling like he was losing something, Sam loosened his grip.

The look Lucifer leveled on him was impossible for Sam to interpret. It was such a chaotic mix of emotions, all trying to be seen at the same time, that all Sam could be certain of was a kind of… melancholy. The feeling of dread rose even higher, nearly choking the first words he had spoken here since.

"What now?"

The smile on Lucifer's lips nearly broke Sam. "Now is the part when you wake up, and see what happens next."

In a blink, the tips of Lucifer fingers were pressed to his forehead, and he felt himself falling, falling, falling awake, his last sight a pair of light blue eyes and a melancholy smile, half-hidden in shadow.

…

XII.

…

Consciousness returned slowly, helped along by a shaft of late afternoon sunlight hitting Sam in the eyes. Somewhere outside an overenthusiastic bird was twittering away. Sam had the dim, faraway impression of lying on something too soft, his neck and ankles hurting.

He groaned, turned over – and nearly fell flat on his face onto the hardwood floor when he rolled off the edge of the couch.

Sam stared blankly. Couch? Well, that explained why he hurt. The thing was too short for him and made him tilt his head at an odd angle to fit, his feet propped over the opposite arm. That made sense, but why was he sleeping on a couch? Hadn't he fallen asleep in a bed? Or had it been an old vinyl chair…

He looked around the room, taking a deep breath that smelled a little like whiskey and a lot like pine.

Sight and smell told him where he was, and the rest of his memory came back to fill in the blanks, despite his feelings on the matter.

The leviathans, their plan to harvest humanity like cattle, and their plan – his, Dean's, Cass' and Kevin's – to bring them all down. The RRE Corporate Enterprises building, the showdown with Dick, and the explosion. Crowley taking Kevin and Meg, no sign of either Cass or Dean, no clue what had happened to them, and Sam left all alone…

Yes, Sam could remember it all too well. He rubbed at his face, which was greasy and rough with stubble, and wondered if he really wanted to wake up. He couldn't quite remember his dreams, but they have to be better than this. What had they been? What little had survived the night was already beginning to fade away. He remembered running away for a long time, then something about blood, demon blood he thought, and then… something good. The dream had ended well, he remembered that much, but the details were all a blur. Just vague impressions were left. Something cold on his lips, a gold ring, soft hair, something touching his forehead…

He shook his head. He couldn't remember. It didn't really matter, whatever it had been. Right now he had other things to worry about, like where he was going.

All of his things were already packed away in Rufus' cabin, the very few non-hunter things he would be taking with him – clothes, wallet, laptop – were squared away in a single bag. He was leaving his hunter past behind him today, taking what little he owned that had nothing to do with the life and getting the hell out. Earth and humanity were as safe as they ever were on an average day, and Sam was done. The life had taken everything from him, many times, and now it was time to leave it all behind.

Maybe it didn't matter where he went, so long as it was away.

Tossing his bag into the trunk of the Impala, he was struck with a dizzying wave of déjà vu. It felt like someone was smiling at him knowingly, laughing at him.

Sam turned, expecting to find someone there but having no idea who.

Dean?

There was no one there. Only Rufus' cabin, dark, all of its secrets locked inside. Sam turned his back on it, climbed into the Impala, and took off. He didn't know where he was going, and if he didn't then no one else would, either.

Ten weeks later, in Kermit, Texas, Sam hit a dog.

…

XIII.

…

In Hell, in a special prison constructed for him millennia before, the devil smiled.

If he had ever entertained the idea that he would end up back in the Cage, Lucifer wouldn't have thought it would be any easier to escape a second time. Less so, when one took his fractious brother into account, throwing endless tantrums and taking his frustrations out either on his vessel or on Lucifer. No, there would be no loose bars in the Cage now. There wasn't even a handy prophesy to depend on this time, no step by step guide to swing open in the door.

Still, there were other kinds of escape. So long as one wasn't too literal in his interpretations, then there were still options. A getaway into his vessel, who had escaped with some help, more than fit his criteria.

Of course, there was the possibility that it was all an illusion. It was a very probable one, in all honesty. The likelihood of his scheme somehow working was remote, and the kind of mental torture of being led to believe that it had was exactly what this place was designed for. It was the kind of thing his exalted Father was oh so good at, to offer with one hand and take away with the other.

But Lucifer had lived in the Cage for too long to be so easily fooled. While Michael ranted and raved at what was only half real and Adam quietly sank deeper into madness, Lucifer remained clear. He could spot what was true and what was false, what was real and what was unreal.

Still smiling, Lucifer touched the crook of his throat, where a crescent of purple, like a black moon or a dark grin was still darkening. This was real.

As real as a bruise.

…

A/N2: Yes, I know Mark Pellegrino doesn't have a pot belly or even the beginnings of one, but I thought it would be adorable if Nick had one. So :p

For those who are waiting for the next chapter of a certain other Supernatural fic I'm working on… yes, I'm working on it. It's next up on my writing slate. :)

Thanks for reading, everyone!