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Sam stares at the vampire horde slavering and howling beyond an invisible barrier.
He could say, I don’t care, do it.
Sure. Lucifer would do it, simple snap of the fingers. And then he’d snap his fingers again, and Sam would be back with nothing but another layer of gore to show for it.
Sam’s choices have never been right. But this time, at least, there’s no choice at all.
He closes his eyes. “Okay,” he says. Stop pretending, he thinks. He focuses on stilling his shaking legs, but in his mind he pictures Lucifer’s face breaking into a smug grin.
When he emerges from the cave, Lucifer’s hand at the small of his back, Sam makes it about ten numb yards before he's leaning against a tree and puking into the grass.
Lucifer’s fingers move to his shoulder, rubbing sympathetically. "Need me to hold your hair back? Like the girl at the party who’s had one too many, huh."
Sam swallows and shrugs him off, carefully grips the straps of his bag tighter and stumbles a few pointless steps away.
Lucifer laughs but allows the space. “Oh, stop, I’ll be a perfect gentleman.”
Sam grabs his water bottle from the outside of his pack, to wash the taste out of his mouth. It’s cracked and empty. Sure, why not. He lets it fall and spits into the dirt, instead, rubs his mouth and regrets it when he remembers that he’s covered in blood.
“Ready to go?” asks Lucifer.
“Yeah,” says Sam.
Sam’s in front, but Lucifer’s setting the pace, north to Dayton, to Jack and Mom and Dean. Lucifer hasn’t bothered asking, and Sam’s not about to volunteer the camp location to make the trip faster. Even though Lucifer can clearly track Dean and the others—even so, even so. Anything that buys time is a good thing.
Now that he has an inch to think, Sam considers a banishment sigil.
He's covered in more than enough blood, but all of it is dry. Brittle, crackling when he moves, soaked into his clothing and matted in his hair, caught under his fingernails, thick and rust-heavy in his nostrils. He wonders how long he lay there drained, muscles slowly stiffening, gore slowly drying, before Lucifer dragged him back. He thinks of his own corpse, Lucifer crouched over it. He imagines Lucifer’s hands on his soul, then on his body—knitting, pushing, stroking over the wound in his throat, tracing over his abdomen, lower, smoothing down his limbs. Touching his lips, tucking hair behind his ear.
Sam needs fresh blood, is the point.
He lost his machete in the frenzy of the pack (when they pulled back his arms to rip out his throat), and there's no way he's going to be able to get a weapon out of his bag fast enough to pull this off. Lucifer's watching him too carefully, could stop him in an instant. Sam can feel his gaze like a physical thing, a cool weight on the back of his neck. Maybe Sam could bite his wrist open in time. He doubts it.
It takes Sam an embarrassingly long time to remember the knife in his boot. In his defense, it’s been an eventful day.
As he enters a dense clump of trees, Sam stumbles, half trips, and catches himself, hands and knees in the underbrush. When he gets to his feet, the knife is clutched under his jacket. He digs it into his palm, praying wordlessly to an absent God, and begins to blindly paint on his abdomen.
Behind him, Lucifer pauses.
Sam’s steps stutter, but he keeps walking, doesn’t stop drawing, prods the wound in his hand again to freshen the flow. The hairs on the back of his neck are prickling in a way he’s too familiar with.
A blow forces him to his knees in the dirt. Lucifer’s grip bruises his wrist and yanks it forward, smashing his hand open against a tree trunk. The knife tumbles to the ground, and Lucifer collects it with the hand not pinning Sam’s. “Trying to get away, huh? Here I thought we had a deal.”
“Let go,” gasps Sam. He meant to say, fuck you.
“Let’s nip this foolishness in the bud,” says Lucifer. He drives the knife straight through Sam’s hand, burying it in the wood beneath, and Sam makes a violent, agonized sound.
Lucifer grabs his face, leans in close, for the first time annoyed. "Try a trick like that again, and I start taking bits off. Think you could draw a banishing mark with no hands?” He holds Sam there for a second, ten, before he relaxes his grip to let Sam reply.
“Jack—“ Sam chokes on his words, has to pause and breathe and swallow—"I’m pretty sure Jack prefers me in one piece."
Lucifer sets his hand against Sam’s shoulder, bracing him to yank the knife out in a flood of fresh blood, and then there’s an icy burn, tugging-needle rush as the wound seals over and vanishes. “There. One piece." He shakes blood from his hand, then brushes a piece of cobweb off Sam's jacket. “Not a trace, you're welcome. What my son doesn't know won't hurt him, Sam, keep that in mind.”
Sam stumbles mutely to his feet.
Lucifer cocks his head in consideration. “Though, that reminds me—“ He flicks his wrist, and Sam yelps again, buckling and clutching at his chest as his ribs fracture, hairline but sharply painful. “Hush, you’re fine. I took off the warding, that's all. You can run but you can’t hide, blah blah blah.”
Sam uncurls, tries to straighten his spine. Lucifer’s still holding the knife.
Lucifer follows his gaze, then smiles. He spins the weapon so he’s holding it by the point, then deftly flips the blade back to Sam. Sam fumbles to catch it. “There you go. No more unpleasantness. New leaf, remember? C’mon, I’ve got a son to meet!”
Night has fallen. Sam’s wavering flashlight beam betrays his shaking hands.
The initial surge of panic and adrenaline is long gone, leaving him cold and numb. Constant terror requires energy he simply doesn’t have. Dread, that he can keep; shame, yeah, why not. But Sam’s too exhausted to keep reimagining all the things Lucifer could do at a moment’s whim. Might do. Lucifer hasn’t touched or even acknowledged him in hours, but that could change. Will change, eventually.
His ribs have long since graduated from a manageable ache to sharp agony, over the course of the forced march. The pain is distracting and makes his breath come in short, fuzzy gasps.
He tries to decide what will happen when they arrive in Dayton. He tries to come up with a plan. Sam will walk into camp, and Jack and Mom and Dean and Cas will all be there, all together, and Lucifer will step out with a grin, and then. And then.
And then he can’t think further. He can’t. It’s something he can’t imagine, through the buzzing blur in his head. The blur is helping out, probably. Certainly. He should thank it, write it a nice card. Anyway, at this rate it's taking all his concentration to keep stumbling forward and not make any noise.
For a while he was trying to keep track of the way back to the cave, the direction of the portal, but between the uneven landscape and the utter lack of landmarks, not even the sun anymore, Sam’s lost all sense of direction. His vision hazes and narrows, until he’s staring at his feet, stumbling, one shoe after another.
He’s layered in cold sweat on top of the blood. He’s been hiking or fighting for most of two days, now. Sam can’t keep this up for much longer, not without food and water and rest. There are protein bars buried in his pack, so unreachable under Lucifer’s watchful gaze that they might as well be in another dimension. And god, water. His tongue is swollen and dry, leathery against the roof of his mouth. It hurts to swallow.
As he struggles through yet more underbrush, he weighs broaching the topic now versus waiting until he actually passes out. Is Lucifer distracted enough that he’s actually forgotten humans can’t live on air? Or is he aware of Sam’s dilemma, and just messing with him? The consequences depend on which it is, and either is possible. It’s novel and terrifying, being so abjectly unable to predict his motivations. Before, at least Sam knew what he wanted, usually. There wasn’t anything else. Here, Sam knows he wants Jack, but besides that, there’s a whole planet of possibilities. This bombed-out Mad Max world is pretty empty, but it’s much less empty than the Cage.
As it turns out, Sam doesn’t need to decide. The choice is made for him when a branch slides out from under his foot as he struggles up a particularly steep incline. Sam crashes back down the treacherous slope and buckles with an involuntary cry.
Lucifer turns back to look at him. Sam tries to scramble upright, but a sudden rush of dizziness makes his vision blur and darken. When he can see again, he’s crumpled at the base of the hill and Lucifer is standing over him.
“Oh, get up.”
Sam tries, he really does. He manages to push himself up awkwardly on one elbow before he collapses again, head spinning, vision dark, coughing and choking on the dust kicked up in his fall.
Lucifer clenches his fist, and Sam screams as his guts twist in agony. He curls into his injured ribs and chokes down the noise until he’s twitching and panting through the pain. “Did you hear me, Sam?”
“C-can’t,” Sam gasps.
Surprisingly, the pressure lets up, icy-hot clench of agony receding. Sam hears more than sees Lucifer squat down, boots crunching in the gravel. “Normally, I’d say we could do this all night, but guess what—you’re no longer the only thing on my to-do list. So, up and at ‘em. Places to be."
Sam squeezes his eyes shut against the ground, panting, pressing his forehead into the edge of a branch. “If-if you want me to w-walk, I need water,” he forces out.
Above him, Lucifer groans. “Humans,” he murmurs, quiet, angry.
Sam’s shaking, but this time when he struggles up to his knees he manages to stay there. He spits out a glob of blood from his bitten tongue. "Hurt me enough and I won’t be able to walk at all,” he says. The sort-of ultimatum sounds shakier than he’d like, but better than he’d feared.
Lucifer snorts. “Don’t be dramatic. I’m not even hurting you,” he says, half-petulant.
The fear and the tension and the frustration suddenly boil over. “Look, maybe you’re not used to walking,” Sam snaps, hoarsely, “but it takes awhile, and it’ll take longer, if you won’t let me have water or rest.”
Lucifer just raises an eyebrow. “Bold and brassy is a good look on you.” He ruffles Sam’s hair, and Sam jerks away. “Fine, fine. Water and rest.”
He stands and touches two fingers to Sam’s forehead, and Sam flinches at the familiar rush of grace. A flood of energy flows into his limbs, his thirst recedes to nothing, and he feels as if he’s just woken from a good night’s sleep. The spiking tension headache behind his eyes vanishes, a gradual pain he’d barely registered building until it was gone. His ribs still ache, but with the second wind it's suddenly manageable again.
“What do you say?"
Thank you, Sam thinks quietly, automatically, before he can stop himself. Something ugly and dormant twists in his chest. He doesn’t say anything out loud, just gets to his feet and brushes dirt from his jeans.
Lucifer’s lips curve into a pleased smirk anyway. “So stubborn. You’re still welcome, though. I am trying to be nice,” he says.
Sam swallows and looks away. The worst part is that he means it, Sam knows he means it.
"Time’s a-wasting. Dean and company are anxious to see you, hup, two three!”
They reach the outskirts of the camp in Dayton not long after noon.
In the long hours since Lucifer’s pick-me-up, Sam’s gone blurry and shivering and staticky again. Feverish, shocky. His chest hurts, his feet are icy and numb. The stench of blood feels indelible, like a permanent part of him. He’s mostly too far gone to process anything, but when he sees the telltale signs of a warded settlement some part of him picks up the pace.
Lucifer, shockingly, hesitates. “Wait a sec, Sam. Remember—watch your words around my boy.”
Sam takes a second to disengage autopilot and grind to a dazed halt. “What are you expecting from me," he says. “What the fuck do you expect me to say to him.”
Lucifer crosses his arms and shrugs. “Like I said yesterday, just the truth. That I’m the reason you’re alive and well and not the blue plate special for a bunch of rabid vamps.”
Sam nods, hooks his shaking thumbs through the straps of his backpack. “And that’s all? He’s not stupid. He knows what you are. What are you gonna do to him when he doesn’t want to be your perfect son?”
"Sheesh, Sam, give me a little credit.” Lucifer has the gall to look honestly offended. Angry, hurt, even, and Sam can tell he’s not faking it. "I get we both have Daddy issues, but c’mon, I’m not my pop. Jack is my child. I would never harm him.”
Sam snorts. “I know you. You harm everyone. You think you’re gonna convince me? I know what you are.” He watches Lucifer’s face harden. He clamps his mouth shut.
Lucifer tilts his head and looks at Sam, long and measured and considering. “I guess you do know me, huh?” He scoffs, then grins, abrupt and false and terribly bright. “Guess what, Sam, wanna know something? I’ve been trying with you, all day. I really have. I resurrected you, I healed you, I’ve been remarkably kind, especially considering that you’ve brainwashed my son to hate me.”
Sam swallows hard.
Lucifer spreads his hands. “See, I’ve had a hell of a time this year. Pardon the pun, but it’s been rough. Michael thought he could drain me. Asmodeus thought he could lock me up, Heaven thought it could kick me out, Little Red thought she could mock me. Sam, I had to panhandle! Me! No one’s given me the respect I deserve.” He shakes his head. “But, you. You get it.”
Sam’s stomach is somewhere south of his knees. His fingernails are digging into his palms where he’s clutching his bag.
Then Lucifer’s stepping forward, and Sam’s backing away, until bark is digging into his pack. Exaggerated, dramatic, too close, Lucifer stares at him and lifts a hand and waggles it. Slowly, he brings two fingers together, pauses, snaps, watches Sam's involuntary flinch-duck-swallow.
Lucifer doesn’t even laugh at the overreaction, and that makes it worse; he just shakes his head and smiles, tiny and private. “Mmn. That’s respect. Dear Sam. You know better than those other idiots, don’t you? You know ‘what I am.’ Tell me, how much convincing did you need, to get onboard with that inane plan to trap me?"
“It was my idea,” says Sam, raspy. A half-truth.
Lucifer can smell those a mile away, and this time, he does laugh. “Sure it was. I thought I was bored of you! But I gotta say, the whole terror and reverence thing? It’s, ah, really doing it for me, y’know?”
He lays his hand on Sam’s chest, firm but gentle. Sam jerks back against the tree, once, automatic, before he forces himself to still.
Lucifer leans in closer, smiles so softly. “You see that? You just... stay where I put you. I don’t need to hurt you. I don’t need to convince you. You already won’t say anything I wouldn’t like, because you know exactly what I’d do to your family.”
Sam twitches and blinks away wetness.
Lucifer pats him, once over the heart, fondly. “Oh, Sam. You’re not even a person anymore. You’re just one giant coping mechanism.”
Sam knocks Lucifer’s arm away. Lucifer, smiling, lets him. “Are we walking, or what?” Sam says hoarsely, around the lump in his throat.
There’s broad grin in Lucifer’s voice. “After you.”
When he stumbles into camp, Sam shivers and blinks at Mary and Dean and Cas and Jack like a prisoner brought up from the darkness, blinded by a glimpse of the sun. He’s still a prisoner, though. And he brought the darkness to their doorstep.
It’s like there’s a leash tied round his neck, leading back to Lucifer’s hand. Invisible, but Sam’s sure that Dean, at least, can see it.
Sam feels it when Lucifer steps out from behind him, he sees it on his family’s faces.
A fresh wave of terror and shame, not just for himself this time, makes Sam bow his head and shutter his eyes.
“Hello, son. I’ve brought you something.”