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The Supernatural characters belong to Kripke Enterprises and the CW, not me. No money is being made from this story. It is for entertainment only.

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Winchesters in Hell

Chapter 1

Not What He expected.

When the gleam of the Impala sparked the memories of his life with Dean Sam gained strength from those sweet thoughts of family and love strong enough to wrest control of his body back from Lucifer. He stopped his fist beating Dean's face into a shapeless mass and remembered that he loved his brother. The world paused. Lucifer raged within, pounding against the prison walls of Sam's faith in love and his brother.

Sam stepped to the edge of the sucking hole in the ground and spread his arms. Lifting his face to the sun he stopped for just a moment to take one last breath of pure air. Without warning something barreled into his ribs just below his armpit and a body struggled against him. Hands were trying to pull him back from the edge. Now was the moment of departure. The body struggling in his arms was his half-brother Adam, the vessel of the Archangel Michael. Sam wrapped his arms tightly around the smaller man and stepped backward into nothingness.

They fell.

The fall into Lucifer's cage lasted just a moment, lasted a full year, never stopped. They spent an eternity falling through the air into the blazing light of Lucifer's everlasting prison. Sam felt the cold burning of the Light Bringer's cage. Even with his eyes firmly closed the unbearable light seeped in and flooded his mind. Lucifer's cage was a mockery of light. To be condemned to an eternity washed by light so bright that it made you blind was a supposedly Merciful God's cruelest joke. Family time in Heaven evidently could only be exceeded by Hell's cruelest torture. No wonder sweet Gabriel had run.

The bars of the cage flashed past. They could hardly be recognized. A straining network of just barely visible dark lines, the bars were the only relief from the explosion of white light that had held the archangel a prisoner for so long. Sam fell ever deeper into the cage. He could hear Lucifer's screams of rage and sorrow. With the quickest of tugs Adam's body was pulled from his arms and whirled away into the light.

Sam smacked into the floor of the cage. The pain in his back felt like his spine had snapped. There was a weightless moment when he floated free, a captive of a prison of unbearable light. Then the floor split open and Sam Winchester fell onto the surface below the suspended cage.

For a moment he was stunned, flooded with a sensation of surprise. Even Lucifer shut up. Sam stared up at the glowing cage. He could clearly see his brother Adam, the vessel of Michael the Archangel, fliting around the cage liked a tiny trapped finch, flitting from side to side, from bar to bar, searching for something lost.

Sam lifted his head and glanced from side to side. He was lying on some dark, stony ground. The boring landscape stretched as far as he could see from his current position. He let his head drop back down and once against found himself staring up at the bottom of Lucifer's cage. He tried to wrap his mind around it.

He could still feel Lucifer trapped inside of his body. The Archangel was currently very quiet; obviously as confused as Sam. The only thing that the Winchester son could grasp was that first of all, he was still in control of the vessel. Lucifer was constrained. Secondly, it appeared that the cage had rejected him. Sam couldn't immediately decide if he was relieved or insulted.

He decided that he would just have to accept that he had fallen into Hell, landed in Lucifer's cage which had chewed on him for a millisecond and then spit him out and now he was lying on Hell's surface with a terrible pain in his back.

He sat up and then pulled himself to his feet. The cage was still just the same distance away. He reached up and tried to touch it. Either the fall had severely damaged his depth perception or the cage was actively moving out of reach. He decided that perhaps logic was not a tool that Hell space welcomed and accepted that he could not touch the cage. Any thought of somehow rescuing Adam would have to be put off until he understood the rules of this plain of existence more clearly.

When he had put his head back to raise his arm to touch the cage he had almost fallen over backward. He had taken quite the hit, he thought. His back felt extremely strange and he was having difficulty balancing as he stood up. There was a rustling noise behind him and he tensed and tried to spin around. Something extremely cold slid into his right hand. Looking down he realized that he was holding an Angel's blade.

He had no idea where that had come from. The rustling sound happened again and now that he was armed he tried once again to spin around. Out of the corner of his eye something dark flickered just out of sight. It took a couple of clumsy tries but finally he realized that he was chasing his own tail. He grabbed the dark object with his left hand and came up with a handful of feathers. When he tried to pull them around to take a closer look he felt the tug in his shoulder blades.

He was shocked to realize that he had wings; big, dark wings. Now that he understood that they were attached to him he stopped trying to grab them and just flicked them forward naturally as if he had been doing it all his life. He took a good long look. They were gorgeous; black as midnight with metallic shimmers of royal blue and emerald green appearing when the angle of light changed. The tips glowed with touches of purple amethyst. They were alive and a wonder to see. Deep inside Sam heard Lucifer laughing.

Lucifer's laughter held no frisson of joy. It was a shocked and unbelieving laughter like the kind of laughter that came when you found you had locked yourself inside a walk in freezer. Lucifer, the Archangel, was laughing at himself. All these years he had pursued Sam Winchester as his perfect vessel; as something that belonged to him by birthright and destiny.

Lucifer's laughter was shocked laughter. The Angel had realized that he had chased Sam Winchester until Sam Winchester had caught him.

Sam flexed his tender back muscles and flapped the wings as he looked around at the landscape of Hell. It was rather boring. Piles of smoldering slag puffed smoke into a vicious looking, ruddy sky marked with streaks of unnatural color; puce, purple and smears of grey. High above and dead center a blazing acid yellow sun pulsed. Nothing moved except the smoke. Northing alive disturbed the landscape of Hell.

A deep voice murmured to Sam. "The backside of nowhere. Millions of years spent looking at the same rejected piece of the universe. This is the place where God is not. This is Hell."

"Lucifer?" Sam asked out loud.

"You know it is, my Vessel. Who else could speak to you here? All this time, all this plotting, I spent it all trying to find you and when I finally do, what happens?" the voice was bitter. "I trade one prison for another. I now know absolutely that My Father enjoys my suffering. All I have gained is my brother Michael now in my cage."

"Knock it off," Sam responded. "Hold your pity party with someone who cares." Sam flipped the Angel blade in his hand, holding it up to the sun to see it gleam. "You better not have killed Dean with my hands. I'll find a way to ram this sword up your ass."

Lucifer laughed his bitter laugh again. "Good luck with that. What would that be? A particularly nasty form of masturbation?"

"Shut up, Lucy." Sam snapped back. "I promise you I'll find a way. If Dean is hurt or dead I'll find a way to make you pay. Remember what I have already done. What was it that your stand-in King, Crowley, called me and my brother? Denim wrapped nightmares? You know I'll find a way."

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Sam decided to take a little tour of Hell. Somewhere he knew there were possibly millions of souls and at least thousands of demons here. It occurred to him that perhaps the light from Lucifer's cage drove the normal inhabitants away. They would be most comfortable in the shadows. Pure white light, burning or not, could be thought of as a sign of hope and Heaven's possible Grace. He doubted that Hell's rulers wanted any hope planted in the condemned.

He turned away from the slag heap and looked further afield. He started to walk around the edge of Lucifer's light. Once moving he noticed that he was naked. He seemed to have exchanged his clothes for wings. His bare feet were pinched and scraped by the sharp shattered rocks that covering Hell's surface. He swung the Angel blade in a graceful slash and it seemed to extend. This was new. He almost wanted to ask Lucy why the sword seemed to extend at will but Lucy had finally shut up and Sam didn't want to encourage the Archangel further. He realized that he was thinking of God's most dangerous son as a whiner.

The sword was now long enough for Sam to use it as a staff. He used it to move some of the rocks from his path. As he moved forward around the curve of the cage more interesting vistas appeared. It appeared that the Cage was on the side of a mountain. The other side opened out into a view of Hell that was active and more than slightly disturbing.

Prominently placed was a crudely built castle of bones, clinging to the mountain slope. He could see creatures crawling slowly up the slope on their bellies. The blackened beasts wound their way between smoking pits and unexpected flames. As Sam watched one of the creatures got caught by a jet of fire. It leaped up and danced as it burned. From a distance Sam almost thought he could hear it screaming.

Sam sat down on a convenient rock. "Alright, Lucy," he rumbled. "What in Hell am I looking at?"

"That is where Crowley keeps his throne. He enjoys the reflected glory of the Cage's Light. For some reason he believes that it enhances his authority even though he had nothing to do with locking me away." Lucifer responded talking like he was in a sulk. "It should be my throne. The little weasel wormed his way in to being King during a power vacuum and he's stuck to the throne like a barnacle on the ass of a boat."

Sam snorted at the description. "Needs to be pried off, does he?"

"Yes," answered the Light Bringer. "You can do it, you know." Lucifer was attempting to manipulate Sam. Sam sat looking over the mountain side cleaning Hell's soot out from under his nails with the Angel Blade.

"Really?" Sam responded to the smooth inner voice. "Just how I can I do that?"

Lucy sounded shocked. "You are The Boy King. Of course you can depose Crowley."

"You are a Winchester, a scion of a fabled bloodline and you have the powers of an Archangel. You can summon the Knights of Hell, all the Masters, all the Powers, to fall at your feet and obey your orders; Beelzebub, Pythius, Belial, Asmadeus; all of them, all of the Great Fallen. They would call you Master and kneel before you. Crowley spends a lot of his time trying to stay out of their way."

"That all sounds pretty good, Lucy, but how do I know you're not just talking complete bullshit?" Sam stood and stretched, expanding his wings to the full extent. He shook them. His feathers rustled together, a harsh, dry sound. The wings glinted in the sun; bands of iridescent color chasing over the upper aspect.

Standing so high above on the stark mountain side Sam was large enough with his wings extended to attract the attention of the crawling beasts below. Some dared to raise their faces to the new creature so high above them. Cries echoed on the mountain slope and twisted limbs were raised to either point or praise.

"That rang the bell." Lucifer muttered and retreated. "Seize your Kingdom, Boy King. The Hell Plain is yours."