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.
How would Sam’s soul look to that nun if she was able to get her hands on it? Would it be dimmed and blurry, an opaque color because of how much it suffered at the hands of Lucifer and Michael for thousands of years?
Would the nun even want his soul after seeing how fragile it must look, and deem it to be useless?
No. Remember how it looked in Death’s bag? All of those souls were in those jars. Sam’s took an entire bag and when Death opened that bag that soul shone so bright it lit the room, everyone else had to look away and it took both Death’s hands to hold it. It’s mutilated, it’s flayed, it’s torn and shredded but it still shines bright like the sun.
He doesn’t know that. I bet he thinks that the nun wouldn’t want it. But it’s still bright.
Scar tissue is stronger than regular tissue. There’s deadened feeling, sometimes. Sometimes there’s no sensation at all. Sometimes there’s hypersensitivity. But it is always, always stronger. And it’s usually noticeable; it’s a different color, or a different texture, or a different thickness. Scars never quite leave completely. (Hell, I still have a scar on my forehead that I got when I was six months old.)
Sam’s soul is made of scar tissue after all that time in the Cage. Nobody will ever come close to matching it’s strength, because nobody else will ever have a soul that’s been flayed and mutilated and put back together. (And yeah, that’s a good thing.) But the benefit is the strength – it’s the strength that let him help Marin in the hospital, and lets him keep going without obvious coping mechanisms, and had him making a cup of tea for a little old spitfire of a woman who expected to be laughed out of the station (and almost was).
Sam’s soul shines brighter because it’s been through literal Hell and come out stronger. It shines because Sam tries to do the right thing in impossible situations. It shines because he has the strength of will to overcome Lucifer and Gadreel. And that will – to do the right thing, to take control of his body, to say No, this is MINE and you do NOT get to control me – is what knitted him together into a patchwork of scars instead of continuing to bleed.
He’s made of scar tissue, and so he’s unbreakable.
This has made me cry for the past five or so minutes. Because it is true and truly the most beautiful thing I have read all day.
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