Chapter Text
Chapter 1: An Empty Railway Station of Derailed Trains of Thought
Sam Winchester had never had an easy life, never been blessed with good fortune, never been born with a silver spoon in mouth. He'd fought tooth and nail for everything he had and everything he wanted, and most days he felt that all he'd ever accomplished was slipping through his fingers like so many grains of sand. Each morning dawned only to bring a new trial, another tribulation to the young man. Not quite thirty yet and already he was weary of life, weary of each sunrise that he could see through the small, barred window in his padded cell. He hadn't always been in this prison of whitewashed calm and drug induced complacency, where people whispered instead of shouted and good doctors told you that if you'd just stop talking to the person over their shoulder then maybe they wouldn't have to give you so many pills. No. He'd had a life once, outside the walls of this place that hedged him in and held him captive with his tormentor, more effectively than any djinn. Or at least, he thought he'd had a life, but some days it was so hard to remember when the hallucinations had begun and when his life had ended.
Sam Winchester had been away at college, Stanford, when his brother, Dean, had picked him up for a weekend hunting trip with their alcoholic ex-marine father. Sam had come back from that frustrating and utterly exhausting trip and collapsed into bed, and he thinks it’s here, in this moment, that he can trace the beginning of his decent into madness. For as he laid on the bed, exhausted from a wearying ordeal with his brother, emotions conflicted over whether he even wanted to attempt reestablishing relations with his estranged family, he felt a drop of something sticky and viscous plop down onto his forehead and then another. Opening his eyes he saw his girlfriend, Jessica, on the ceiling, suspended as if she was laying on the ground and he was the one whom gravity was forgetting, her hair splayed out in a corona about her head. Her eyes were wide and frightened, staring at him with the soulless gaze of the dead, right before she caught on fire. He'd managed to roll off the bed and run into the kitchen, breath ragged and shallow, before he'd slammed into... Jessica? That's the first hallucination he can remember, because it was the first he had evidence that it wasn't true, or at least, he thinks it is. Some days, he's not sure if Jess was ever real. Some days he still sees her, but only as a second skin for his main companion who haunts him, hounds him, day and night.
So he left Stanford, left his 'normal life' without giving notice or explanation, and traveled with his brother; hoping against hope that his brother's steady, quiet strength would somehow help ground him. It almost did, almost chased away the demons in the corners of his mind, almost stilled the drums in the deep, almost quelled the raging of the coming tempest. But four years passed and he was losing time, blackouts were too frequent now. He was seeing his companion every day, and who was he to say which days were real and which were fake. The final straw came when he awoke one night and found his hands clenched around Dean's throat, his brother's eyes wild and frenzied as he tried to shake his nearly possessed brother off.
It hadn’t been Sam who had started choking Dean…
They'd checked Sam into the asylum the next day.
Neither of them talked over the long car ride. Neither of them had anything to say. It'd been four years, and Sam had never once told Dean that his constant companion was Lucifer, so why should he cross that chasm of silence now to try and mend a relationship that was quite literally choked by his lies of omission and tainted by blood. Instead, he'd looked out the windows and then filed mutely into his new prison, never speaking to another soul; not his doctors, not the attendants, not the other patients, all for fear that Lucifer might again become possessive of him and use his body to enact his swift retribution.
What did it matter if this was real or not? Either way, he was living in Hell.
But even in Hell, one learns to adapt; and over the years, his jailor and tormentor became something of an on again off again companion, foul though his temper was when it was roused. So three years passed by with the dull progression of time that is marked only in the hollow spaces left in your bones as you carve meaning into silence and find visions in the empty stares into the abyss of nothing.
And so it was that one blustery autumn morning, as the first beams of the new day began to creep through his barred window and kissed the cushioned surface of his padded ceiling, that Sam Winchester lay there, staring up at the ceiling silently. He absently decided to count the padded mounds again, wondering if one had been taken or added whilst he'd managed to get a brief forty minutes of sleep before having another nightmare. He noticed Lucifer’s presence in the room, but chose to ignore him, busying himself with sitting up slightly and grabbing the pill one of the doctors must have left for him, swallowing it with a sip of water.
Today was when he was to meet his latest psychiatrist in a string of psychiatrists whom he had never cared enough to talk to, let alone look in the eye. He thought that three years of silence would have been enough of a clue as to the fact that he wasn’t interested in talking to people, but he supposed that it was their job to keep trying, just as it was his job to keep ignoring all of them. If he didn’t ignore them, well, that was too painful on so many levels. For talking to them would only make it painfully obvious that he simply could no longer differentiate between what was real and what was not. That fact alone cut him to the core, and how he wished that it didn’t. How he wished that he could be numb to the fact that he had completely lost himself to the world around him, floundering helplessly in the transient reality inside his mind. So he didn't talk about it, he didn't acknowledge it, didn’t let it show that each day that fact was eating away at him like a canker.
Sam rubbed his eyes, holding back a yawn as he leaned back against the wall.
"Penny for your thoughts?" Lucifer murmured quietly, barely a whisper above the smooth electric hum of the halogen lights overhead. He was relaxed for the moment, a rare peace between the two that would certainly be shattered once one of his many more capricious moods took hold of him; but for this moment, he was content to lean against the quilted surface of the padded wall and inspect his fingernails, only occasionally glancing through ashen blond lashes at his wearied comrade.
Sam’s response was a silence that stretched on for what felt like an eternity, as he listened to the subtle sounds that came from Lucifer: the quiet breaths, the slight shifting of weight from foot to foot, the rustle of his shirt as he raises a hand to scratch at his nose. He could catalogue Lucifer in sensations like sound and sight and smell, in minutia that most people never bother to take the time to observe, and that was part of what scared him about the fallen angel. The minutia made him real, gave him a weight and a gravity and a quantitative mass. Could the same be said for other people? For that matter, how much of what he perceived was a fabrication of his senses? After all, when you’re crazy, can you trust what you perceive, what you empirically know?
A dream was much the same, information that your mind laid forth into an alternate reality, different from one’s own, in which the rules could be forwards or backwards or upside down. And would you know? They said that you could tell by doing things in dreams, like trying to turn on a light switch or pinching yourself or knocking on wood; but wasn’t that all dependent on the function of how well your memory had catalogued those actions and how well your subconscious could recreate them? The wearied man blinked slowly, the insides of his eyelids dragging against his dry eyes like sandpaper, practically an audible resistance, and he wondered if he would ever be able to distinguish reality from his hallucinations again. Lucifer was real. He just wasn’t certain of all these other people who flitted in and out of his life like mayflies, moving too fast and living too short of lives to catalogue their nuances.
He often lost his train of thought like this as his thoughts would chase themselves down damp forest paths in his mind, lush with undergrowth, which nearly screamed to be pondered, to be explored. It was just one more reason that Sam avoided conversations with people; his thoughts were too hard to hold onto, his mind all too ready for introspection.
"Did you give me that nightmare last night? Or was it all me?" he asked softly, finally pulling his mind back from its tangential musings, taking another sip of the water to help unstick his tongue from his palette. Last night's dream had been particularly awful. In it, Mary and John and Dean were there, but they weren't them, not really. They were shades of themselves, or maybe tormented wraiths, whispering torturous, barbarous things to Sam that he didn't want to hear and yet knew by heart. He’d woken up just as they were closing in on him, but not soon enough to escape the torture of their words which still resounded through his head. The problem was that their words weren’t lies, everything they accused him of was true and damning.
The fallen angel gave Sam a feline grin, feral and vicious, "Now bunk buddy, you know that I prefer a more one on one approach when I invade your dreams." Stalking towards the young man's bed with a sinuous grace that would have been impossible for a corporeal being, the man stopped just short of the edge of the bed and crossed his arms. "Using multiple people, just feels so... impersonal, wouldn't you say?" He rolled his wrist, gesturing loosely with his right hand as he thought about the mechanics of how he enjoyed torturing Sam the most. "I do appreciate using those closest to you, but all at once? No, that loses something. It's better to draw it out," pausing, he pointed at Sam and winked, his head cocking rakishly to the side, "wouldn't you agree?"
Sam flinched slightly at the response, looking anywhere but at Lucifer, trying to avoid his suffocating gaze. He had no idea how Lucifer still had this effect, after all it had been years, but he could still render Sam terrified. He let out a shaky sigh, nodding in response to the question, which he presumed was rhetorical. Briefly he wondered if Lucifer actually wanted an answer to his rhetorical question, because sometimes he was like that, demanding answers more for attention than for the sake of the conversation at hand.
Lucifer chuckled darkly before raising his head at the sound of a key slipping the tumblers of the lock in Sam's door. "Guess playtime will wait a little today. We have to look our best for our new shrink today. Right, Sammy boy?" His grin tugged one side of his mouth, pulling it into a thin scar across his face, mirthless and full of foreboding. "I can't imagine why they keep sending you new ones. Haven't they realized that you won't talk to anyone yet?"
"Must say I agree with you there." Sam muttered begrudgingly, leaning back and closing his eyes as someone wandered in. He briefly heard the voice of one his nurses telling him that this was his new psychiatrist, who had just come along to introduce himself before their session later on that afternoon. He didn't acknowledge that the nurse had even spoken, didn't even open his eyes. It wasn’t until the psychiatrist spoke, his voice painfully familiar, that Sam's eyes snapped open, and he stared up at the man. He was so startled that he’d missed whatever it was the man had been saying, but that was immaterial, because he wouldn’t have been able to hear anything past the roaring in his own ear. For in front of him, he knew all of this. The blonde hair, the blue eyes, the focus, it was all there in his face. There was two of them in the room, two Lucifers.
"Oh my..." The gruff male nurse, or attendant as he preferred to call his position, couldn't help but exclaim. He looked between the startled expression on Sam's face and the new psychiatrist. "Well," He clapped the man on his shoulder, "You must really be something special, doc, because Sammy here never so much as looks twice at anyone."
"Mhmm," The man carefully extricated himself from the nurse's grip and turned his attention to Sam, holding out a hand just far away enough from the younger man to not feel threatening, but close enough that he would only need to sit up slightly to shake it. "Greetings, Sam, my name is Nikolai Woland, but please feel free to call me Nick. I'm going to be your new psychiatrist."
Sam could hear his heart beating, far too fast for his liking, too fast likely to be healthy with his sedentary life style. Was this real? He looked back and forth between 'Nick' and Lucifer, the latter of whom looked about to burst into a fit of laughter at any second. He flinched away from Nick's hand, knowing that this had to be one of Lucifer's sick jokes. "Stay… Stay away from me!" he hissed, although his voice wasn't anywhere near as firm as he wanted it to be. God, his head was suddenly killing him.
The nurse's mouth just about fell off of his face, "He... talked? He never talks!" Turning his gaze back to the new psychiatrist, he couldn't help the tinge of respect that crept into his eyes, even if it was unwarranted. He had no idea what was special about this man, but no one affected any change in the Winchester, and in less than a minute this man had gotten him actually saying something?
Lucifer snickered and placed a hand over his mouth, shaking his head back and forth as his eyes twinkled in devious mirth. "Oh, this. This is simply too delicious." He gesture between himself and the doctor for a moment, "You think I had something to do with him?"
Pulling his hand away slowly, Nikolai was careful to keep any emotion off his face, portraying only a collected calm that he'd found had helped put his patients at ease at his last position. "Well, I look forward to seeing you at our appointment this afternoon, Sam." As Nikolai nodded his head to Sam, Lucifer looped an arm over his doppelgänger’s shoulder and gave it a gentle squeeze.
"Oh Sammy, we are going to have. So. Much. Fun."
Sam ignored the nurse’s asinine comments, regarding him as insignificant, as he always did. He looked over at Lucifer, who was still gently snickering, reminding him of a hyena, bloodthirsty for a spectacle. No. This wasn't real. It couldn't be real. Maybe this whole thing was just another game he had to play, another deadly game where he was thrown into the middle with no idea of the rules or the expectations or the winning team. Either way, he was still very nearly petrified at the thought of two Lucifers. "No." He groaned, leaning forward and putting his head in his hands. Real or not, this was going to take a lot of effort. He genuinely couldn't tell whether or not Lucifer had anything to do with this, but the look on his face made it seem like even Lucifer found this too good to be to true.
Nikolai seemed to debate whether or not he should say anything more, some internal struggle held him captive a moment longer before he came to a decision and merely nodded to the tortured man. Turning on his heel in a manner reminiscent of military training, he walked from the room with much the same fluid grace that Lucifer possessed but only half the self-importance. The nurse, the salt and peppered, bearded fellow named Bobby Singer, followed out after him, still dumbfounded by the short exchange.
"Well now, things just got a whole new level of exciting, haven't they?" Lucifer said with a smirk, sitting down next to Sam on the edge of the bed. He bumped shoulders with the Winchester, fiendish glee on his face.
Sam shuffled away, recoiling immediately at Lucifer's touch, still in a state of panic. "I... I don't understand. How?" he muttered, his voice sounding a lot more broken than he wanted it to. "You seriously had nothing to do with this?" he asked, although he was fairly certain he wouldn't get a straight answer from his fallen companion.
Shrugging, as if the younger man's horror at his proximity meant nothing to him, Lucifer crossed a leg over his knee and rested his elbow on it, propping his chin on his fist so that he could look over at Sam in a slightly more relaxed pose. "He’s really not my style of torture. Filleting off your skin for a few hours in your mind or actually breaking your bones when you ignore me, but this? No. Maybe he's from your subconscious? I hate to say it, Sam, but you are the crazy one, out of the two of us." Mused the angel quietly. "I mean, we both know that I'm more than a little possessive, so why, by all that is damned, would I want to compete with another version of myself for your attentions?" Pausing to think a moment, he unfolded himself and bent down towards the floor, pulling a chain up from a deep fissure in the tiled floor that Sam was almost sure hadn’t existed before today, but he couldn’t be sure, because sometimes they changed how many quilted bumps were on the ceiling and sometimes people came into his room without faces. Reality was simply too capricious to trust.
"No, I think we'll spend the time until your session in quiet contemplation about why we shouldn't talk to strangers." Lucifer turned around and the chain sprang to life, whipping around Sam and securing him to the bed.
He thought for a second about what Lucifer said. It was true; he couldn't understand why Lucifer would make another version of himself when he had no real reason to, especially when this doppelgänger seemed so calm and ordinary, the opposite of Lucifer. However his thoughts were abruptly cut off as he felt the bite of cold steel rip across his skin, tightening incrementally as if the chain was some enchanted boa constrictor, squeezing tighter with every exhalation he made. He struggled furiously, although he knew there was no point, but he’d be damned if he let himself be trussed up without a fight, anger and claustrophobia equally fuelling his resolve. "What the hell?" he stammered, still struggling against his binds.
Here it was; the dichotomy of Lucifer that had him walking a tightrope and sleeping with both eyes screwed firmly shut, the madness that was a snarling beast inside the fallen angel’s heart and caused his ordinarily gentle nature to twist into the facsimile of a demon and torment Sam out of an unimaginable depth of sorrow. And as petrified as Sam was in these moments, he couldn’t help the part of his heart the broke because he honestly felt that he understood that Lucifer lashed out at him because there was someone who had wronged him long before, whom he couldn’t ever forgive and he couldn’t ever forget; and it wasn’t hate that drove his actions, but the most twisted love that Sam had ever seen. And that broke his heart, shattered it into a million pieces; because all it took was for him to imagine if Dean or John ever cast him away, told him that he wasn’t worth it… But hadn’t that happened already?
It had been three years, and no one had ever visited him. Not once.
So yes. Sam thought that maybe, in some infinitesimally small way, he could understand the depth of sorrow and betrayal that shown in Lucifer’s baleful eyes.
“Why are you doing this, Lucifer? Are you planning on torturing me because I, what? Talked to the guy? Told him to leave me alone?” Sam bit out; his emotions waging a war for prominence as his body swiftly fell into the old routine of “fight or flight” adrenal response.
But Lucifer didn’t respond, didn’t explain his sound and fury. Sam knew something had set him off, but it was so very rare for Lucifer to be lucid enough in these moments to explain himself.
Instead his face morphed, long golden hair cascaded down to frame it. Suddenly Jess was standing there, gazing at Sam with a sad sort of compassion. She sat down on the edge of the bed and stroked the side of his face. "Why did you leave me all alone, Sam? After that hunting trip with your brother, you came back but, it's like you never really came back to me, did you?"
Every time Lucifer did this, Sam imagined the next time would become a little bit easier. It was his favorite torture after all, so he used it a lot. Sam held on to the hope, but it never came true, it never got any easier. His heart literally ached when he saw Jess in front of him, felt Jess' hand touch his face gently. He closed his eyes; it was all he could do. "Stop it. Stop this. I won't talk to them anymore, alright? Just stop it, please…" he pleaded, squeezing his eyes shut even tighter, trying to block out Jess... no, Lucifer's words.
Another hand was placed onto his face, feather light and lovingly gentle, "Sam, please look at me. Please." Jessica pleaded with him in a voice that was ravaged with pain and remorse. "I can tell that you're broken over all of this, that you feel guilty. You never could hide that from me, you know?" She smiled then, a small, fragile thing, like the caged bird that still found the strength to sing. Stroking his face again she leaned in and placed a chaste kiss against each of his closed eyelids. "I mean, when you start telling me that your dead family members are haunting your dreams and telling you that you weren't good enough, Sam, that kind of clues me in that you need me to tell you that I forgive you. That I'll always forgive you."
He shook his head, trying to get her... him to get off of him. Those words hurt, almost as much as most of the physical torture he'd experienced in the past, and in some ways they hurt worse, hurt different. They stabbed in places that he thought no longer felt anything, places of his heart that he though had long since collected dust and hung cobwebs and ossified; but the fresh waves of pain brought with them a physical nausea that would have cause him to double over if he wasn’t restrained by the chains. He barely kept his eyes shut, knowing that if he had to look at Jess, it'd be that much closer to impossible to ignore her – him – , that much closer to impossible to look into those immortal eyes and not resonate with the pain inside, drown inside them.
"I'm begging you. Stop this." He struggle harder against the chains that held him in place. He bit down on his lip, needing something else to focus on other than the sounds of Jess' voice. The small amount of physical pain was a sweet release, giving him something to distract himself with. He knew this was probably a bad idea, as it would just enrage Lucifer off even more, but he was past the point of caring.
Jess moved one of her hands from his face and began stroking it through his hair, trailing nails softly against his scalp as she used to do when they'd lain together and he'd awoken from his nightmares, scared and stressed and so petrified to close his eyes. "Why do you always push me away Sam? You know that this doesn't have to be a bad thing." And she wasn't just talking about now, wasn't just talking about her, was she?
Sam almost relaxed into Jess' touch, almost. It used to be such a great comfort to him, and Lucifer had even managed to manipulate that into a form of torture. He shook his head fiercely, trying to get her hands off him. "You're not Jess. I'm not an idiot. I'm not gonna give in, you know that." Finally opening his eyes to look at 'Jess', he glared at her, still biting down fiercely on his lip as the copper tang of blood filling his mouth and flooding his nose with its heady scent, helping to ground him. "You're not real." he hissed, finally sounding just as harsh as he intended to.
Because Lucifer was real, but Jess wasn’t. Had she ever? He didn’t know anymore, but this wasn’t real. Not now, not here.
Her hand stilled in its motion as her eyes took on a glassy shine, filling with hot, burning tears. In a whisper that was wrenched from her chest she finally asked as the first tear fell onto his face, "But you wish I was sometimes, don't you Sam? I do everything for you, I'll be anyone for you, Sammy... So why? Why?" Her tears were falling faster, blurring her vision as she buried her face in his chest.
He took a deep breath, repeating it to himself over and over again in his head that she was not real. He wasn't going to let Lucifer win, not this time. Not ever. Jess was dead and that was a truth he had to hold onto, whether it was real or not; otherwise he would torture himself endlessly with the what ifs that never ended. "Fuck you." Hissing, he jerked away again to get 'Jess' off him.
Jess's hands suddenly gripped his head like talons, nails biting into the flesh with painful precision. With her head still buried in his chest she murmured, "If you want to make this harder on yourself, I wash my hands of you..." Pulling herself from him as if there was a gravitational attraction, bonding them together, she rose with grim determination, her skin sloughing off in great, bloody, gelatinous sections; until Lucifer stared down at him with a harsh expression. "She would have gone easier on you, you know," he whispered, voice tight with some uncertain emotion. Then he dug his clawed fingers through Sam's skull and bashed the man's cranium against the headboard until he blacked out and knew no more.
He had no idea how long he'd been unconscious for, but he hadn't had any nightmares, so likely it wasn't that long at all. Groaning at the new feeling of pain in his head, he opened his eyes to find he was still chained to the bed. He looked up to find Lucifer glaring down at him, looking decidedly infuriated. Sam immediately started to regret his actions, and not just because he'd pissed Lucifer off. "Sorry." His voice was weak and too deep from sleep, not sounding at all like his own, as he meet Lucifer's gaze. For with all the pain that Lucifer brought down upon him, he was also the only one in Sam’s life who was always there, the only one who accepted every apology without ceremony, the only one who shared riddles in the lazy afternoons and laughter in the darkness before the dawn. He may have been a fallen angel, but when they weren’t at each other’s necks – and there were times when Sam was as much to blame as Lucifer – he was indeed Sam’s closest confidant.
Lucifer continued in his silent vigil a while longer, the anger bleeding out of his gaze into apathy at the word. Eventually he scoffed and flicked his hand, the chains recoiling back into the crack in the linoleum tiled floor and disappearing. Silently turning on his heel, he stalked across the room and stood against the far wall, again watching Sam. "So, what are you going to do about Lucifer number 2?"
He breathed a sigh of relief as the chains uncoiled and fell away, stretching his limbs immediately. He relaxed a little, and sat up, leaning against the headboard. Flexing one of his numb hands, he felt about his head with the other, and came away with blood from ten new gashes in his skull. His mind only dimly registered that there was blood on both of his hands, tissue and hair and blood under all of his fingernails. However, it was the nature of his delusions to ignore the paradox, because Lucifer had been the one to hurt him. "I'm still really confused by the whole thing." he mumbled honestly. "What do you want me to do? You seemed pretty pissed that I spoke to him." he muttered simply.
The angel shook his head mutely and stared off into the middle distance that was neither here nor there, somewhere in his memories. When he spoke it was hazy, as if from a dream, "How many years have we been together now, and you still don't understand me... It wasn't that you spoke to him." Finally looking at his companion, Lucifer narrowed his eyes slightly in some dark emotion, but with half the conviction of earlier, "It's that you conjured him up in the first place."
"But I didn't mean to! I don't even know what's real, what I'm thinking or what you're thinking anymore. It's all merged into one fucked up little world, hence the reason I'm stuck in here." he snapped, gesturing around his head with a hand, showing the maelstrom of his mind; and he could believe how much more at ease he felt after finally saying these things out loud. "I didn't do it on purpose." he muttered, softer this time. In all honesty, he wished he was still in his nightmares at times like this. Down there it was straightforward, no confusion. This was just torturous on so many levels.
The tension bled out of the lines and angles of Lucifer's body then, and he relaxed his pose. "No, I suppose you didn't." He walked over to the bed and knelt down in front of Sam, putting himself a little lower than the young man's eye level and gazing up at him with a magnanimity that was always there during his more pleasant moments, as if the two of them were the thickest of thieves. "All I wanted was a little honesty about it, and if you say it, then that's all there is to it. We'll get to the bottom of this Nikolai fellow..."
He didn't want to trust him, but he did. He knew that he wouldn't hurt him, not for now anyway. He could tell from the look in his eyes, a look he'd seen on the rare occasions where Lucifer wasn't tormenting him, just talking to him. He nodded simply, visibly relaxing. "Yeah. Alright..." he replied softly, before taking a sip of the water next to his bed.