Dean should have pushed Sam, that night he gave her the spell. “I know what Rowena is dealing with,” Sam had said, his face soft and vulnerable in the way that always catches Dean’s heart. “She’s not the only one who feels helpless.”
“What do you mean?”
Dean asked. He did ask. But he didn’t want to know. And Sam had seen it on his face, the not wanting, and had sniffed a little and blinked and his eyes had shuttered over, and he’d given Dean some bullshit spiel about getting to Mom and Jack.
It’s not like Dean doesn’t know the kind of thing that happened in the Cage. The dark stuff. The stuff Sam doesn’t talk about, that they can’t ever talk about because the only time Dean heard it was from Sam half-deluded during those scary six months when his wall came down. (Then, and from Crowley in the sticky depths of some no-name dive, when Dean was drunk and a demon and certainly couldn’t care less.) (“Nasty stories about what happened to poor old Moose,” Crowley had said, testing the waters, and drip-fed the gory details until Dean sloped off to get laid.)
It’s better to talk about this shit. Dean knows that. He wants Sam to be able to talk about it; Sam whose walls are more carefully constructed than anything Death ever built him. He wants to know. And yet he’s been pussy enough to be glad Sam can’t say it out loud.
All this to say
that when Sam stumbles into the campsite crusted with blood, a miracle in brown plaid and ugly jeans; and then behind him, Dean recognises Lucifer’s familiar shape; he sees the sick, dull shame in his brother’s eyes and he remembers all of it, is hit with it, this weight of what he doesn’t (does) know.
how many times do you think lucifer played the “one of you must die or both of you will” game with sam once he was tortured and broken enough to lose hold of reality?
how many times did sam try to kill himself so that the image of who he loved (dean jess jody ellen bobby jo cas dean dean dean) could live?
(every time.)
how many times did lucifer torture and slaughter them anyway and made sam watch?
They get everyone squared away. Mary back in her room, New Charlie and New Bobby as close to Dean as he can reasonably put them. Ketch and Mary seem to have come to an uneasy truce, but he still puts the man as far away from her as possible. Some people have already partnered in one way or another, and others pick roommates. It works. It’s fine. Most of the good guys made it through safely, neither of the bad guys did, and dear god Sam is alive. He’s here and alive, standing in the kitchen in bloodstained jeans and someone else’s sweatshirt, drinking whiskey. They don’t need to think about how it happened. It happened, and nothing else matters.
(Sometimes Dean watches Sam do something he never did Before – an overly-startled flinch at a loud noise, a very specific hands-clenched thousand-yard stare, the way he accepts Cas’s healing with fearful eyes and a stubborn jaw – and he thinks this is from Hell, this is Lucifer’s doing. And if he allows himself to think about it further, which he tries not to do, he thinks if I had let him go to Heaven after Cold Oak, if I’d just had the balls to let go, he never would have gone to Hell. He never would have met Lucifer. This is all on me.
He has never mentioned it to Sam, because he’s terrified that his brother will turn to him with those sad, fearful eyes and say yeah, I think about that too.)
The party’s winding down, so they’re digging dusty cots out of a
back corner of the bunker where Sam had vaguely remembered seeing them stashed
when Sam stops. Takes a breath and wraps his arms tighter around the bedrolls he’s
carrying, and says, “Dean.”
If his tone didn’t give away that he’s
serious, the way he glances at the closed storeroom door does.
“Yeah?” Dean asks, straightening up, trying to sound like he’s not
too tired for whatever’s coming.
“You need to talk to him,”
Sam says. “To Jack. About his—about Lucifer. Jack needs to know, to understand
what he’s really like.”
“We were trying,” Dean points
out. “Kid didn’t seem like he wanted to listen.”
“No.” Sam shakes his head.
“He’d listen, he just—he needs the truth. Everything. What Lucifer’s tried
to do—what he’s done. To—to everyone.”
Jack would care, Dean thought. The kid
had been angry enough about Michael, what the archangel had done to his own
world; he probably wouldn’t be thrilled to hear Lucifer had tried for his personal Armageddon here, on Jack’s own world.
But a world’s abstract. What’d really
gotten Jack fired up was getting to know the people Michael had hurt, the
people he wanted to protect. And if Jack knew that truth, about what Lucifer had really done—to everyone, yeah. But
also… “What he did to you,” Dean says.
Sam flinches, barely—a twitch of the
shoulders, a shadow across his eyes—confirmation Dean would’ve rather done
without. “Thought that was yours to tell,” Dean says, pitching his
voice light.
Sam’s spine stiffens anyway; he
swallows, throat tightened. “Yeah, well. I meant to—I tried. And I—couldn’t.
I don’t know how to—there aren’t—” He squares his shoulders, faces Dean
like he would a firing squad. “But you—you could tell him. You know.”
Know what, Dean could ask.
Because Sam doesn’t know how to talk about this, not even to Dean.
But Dean’s been to Hell himself, not the Cage, but enough to know that maybe there aren’t words for this. Words for
whatever Sam’s remembering, when occasionally light glances across a metal
blade and he jerks back, whole body twisting away. When there’s a rattling
sound and his eyes dart up, scanning the ceiling for something unseen over him.
Years later and there are still foods
Sam won’t order anymore, that he looks away when Dean digs in, until Dean
figures out what he shouldn’t order. There are injuries he won’t let Dean tend
to—bandaging up his hand is fine, his calf, his back; but if his face gets cut
he’ll clean it up in front of a mirror; if his thigh’s gashed he’ll let Dean
thread the needle but sews it up himself.
Dean could tell Jack about that year after the wall came down, hunting
Leviathans and watching Sam coming apart stitch by stitch and Dean wasn’t
strong enough to keep him together—trying to hold on with all he had and it
wasn’t enough, not then, not in the years after, no match for what was
tearing Sam apart. Lucifer, bursting through the seams of Sam’s existence, and
the only reason there was anything left afterwards was because Sam’s made of
stronger stuff than any mortal man possibly should be, fireproof, imperishable.
Yesterday, give or take, he got to hug Sam again, jacket crusted with blood but breathing, and no,
Dean will never understand that strength, where it comes from; but he’s
grateful for it, every fucking day.
“Please,” Sam says, looking Dean
straight in the eye, for all his shoulders are hunched like he’d rather be
looking anywhere but. Making himself beg because it’s what he has to do; strong
enough for that, too. “Jack needs to—”
“Yeah,” Dean says. “Okay.
I’ll talk to him. If he’ll listen,” because the kid likes Dean, for some
damn reason, but Jack never looks at him like he looks at Sam.
But Sam’s back relaxes, shoulders
unclenching. “Thanks.” He gets a better grip on the bedrolls in his
arms, pulls another one into the pile.
“Maybe we don’t need to
anyway,” Dean remarks, as he picks up the pair of cots. “With Lucifer
back there—maybe Michael will off him.”
“No,” Sam says, barely even
resigned; he might as well have been talking about the date of the next full
moon. “He’ll be back. Jack will have to deal with him again.”
And you, Dean doesn’t
say. Maybe this time he’ll be there, able to watch. Sam facing Lucifer, with
Jack at his side—Jack knowing the truth, and knowing that, he’ll be able to see
it, see how much hurt Lucifer inflicts just by existing in the same dimension
as Sam. Jack with his human heart and his growing protective instincts, and all
his power.
Dean isn’t going to tell Sam this,
either, but he’s looking forward to it.
Can Sam please tell Jack about what Lucifer did to him
sam looks at lucifer talking to jack, feeling sick, and he knows he has to say something, he knows he does. but if sam can’t even say it under the best of conditions, then he DEFINITELY can’t say it with lucifer smiling at him over jack’s shoulder.
and jack’s a child, he’s not even a year old, he don’t deserve to be saddled with this burden, this legacy of evil, these crimes too huge and hideous for sam to speak.
I did mean 200, but… you’re right that it gets complicated.
As you said, one earth month is about 10 Hell years. Sam was in hell for over a year and a half. 18 months x 10 years per month = close-ish to 180 years, give or take, or “around 200 years.”
Unfortunately, the show hasn’t really nailed down whether time dilation works differently in the Cage than it does in regular Hell, but regardless, it was Bad™. Dean spent an unimaginable 40 years in Hell and came back with PTSD that rendered him unable to sleep much (if at all).
Sam… well. Sam’s literal soul was “flayed to the raw nerve” and could not be returned to his body without the oldest being in the known universe building a psychic wall thatstill wasn’t strong enough to entirely suppress the damage.
So 180 years and change is certainly bad enough, but it could be worse:
Because of course there’s also that scene in season 6 where Sam’s wall is crumbling and he has a seizure and experiences Hell memories. The show makes a point of having Dean say that Sam was out for 2 or 3 minutes and then asking how long it felt like to Sam. He says it felt like “a week, give or take.”
(And knowing how Sam treats his own pain, I’m gonna guess it was leaning closer to give than take, so it could very well have been longer than the numbers we end up with, but for the sake of convenience, we’ll say a week.)
There are a lot of problems with accepting it as an accurate measurement of Sam’s hell time, but it’s certainly possible.
Let’s entertain the idea, for a moment, that Sam was right, and three minutes on earth is a week in the Cage.
This is where it gets scary. Thornshrike posted an excellent breakdown of what it would be if Sam experienced Hell with that sort of time dilation, but to summarize:
3 minutes = 1 week.
One day (1440 minutes) = 480 weeks
One year = 52 weeks. 480/52 = 9.2 years
One day topside is 9.2 years in the cage.
9.2 years per day x 548 days (1.5 years) =
Over 5000 years.
But let’s try again. Dean said it was two or three minutes, right? Well, what if it was two?
2 minutes = 1 week
One day (1440 minutes) = 720 weeks
One year = 52 weeks. 720/52 = 13.8 years
One day topside is 13.8 years in the cage.
13.8 years/day x 548 days (1.5 years) =
7,587 years
I did a very painful thought exercise many moons ago when I was new to the fandom and liked to hurt myself. If you want to suffer, you can check it out. It is aptly titled, I accidentally crushed my soul.
But I mean… even if Sam’s estimation of his experience of Hell isn’t right and we just go with Dean’s, Sam was tortured in the Cage more than five times as long as he has been alive.
Given the sorts of horrors that the Winchesters encounter on a daily basis, I was a bit surprised that the not-very-gory meat factory in 12×18 was enough to put Sam off his food. But then I remembered this scene from Season 7 – a hallucinatory glimpse at Sam’s time in the Cage – and, yeah. Okay.
Sam reacting to the cut up lizard.
Sam upset about the man being carved up.
Sam dislikes dismembered flesh.
I think it’s no coincidence that these reactions are occurring in seasons where Lucifer or his memory are active.
Poor, brave, strong, tortured Sam. He’s gone through so much agony in the past that Lady Bevel is just an “accent in a pantsuit” in his rational mind, but his body and his instincts as a human being aren’t going to play along nicely with this idea. He knows that it’s just some posh British woman in front of him, but his body is remembering that cage, just like that traumatized part of his brain that, as a result of that PTSD, is likely actually reliving that pain. And yet, he keeps it together (or pretends to) so well that he can actually talk back with sass (read: coping mechanism) and maintain his silence beyond the point where his torturers can’t even comprehend how he hasn’t broken. All this is hard even for someone who hasn’t just lost a brother, as Sam believes he has. What absolutely astounds me is how strong Sam must be to show so much spirit here, and just how horrific the cage must have been to make him this way.
This might not be 100% what you asked for, but I hope you like it anyway!
Warning for gory descriptions.
The ceiling fan twitches overhead, making its final slow circles in the dark. Everything is quiet, except for Dean’s soft snores and the occasional car passing by outside, a hush like waves as its tires scrape the asphalt. Sam focuses on these things, as well as the dull pain of his thumb bothering the scar on his palm. If he doesn’t, he’ll have to look to his left where Jess’s skin is blackened and flaking. He refuses to look, but he can feel her smile, made crooked by the incoming wisdom teeth which had bothered her in the months before she died.
Sam pulls the thin motel sheets up to his chin and rolls to the right. Dean is sweaty and sleep-warm, his arm dangling over the side of his bed. Sam wonders how he does it. How did he relearn to sleep after forty years in Hell?
Sam isn’t sure when he last slept. Dreams and wakefulness are to difficult to tell apart these days.
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