Chapter Text
It’s something Sam cannot stand thinking about. Missing the devil. Missing the guy that hurt him so badly if he even thinks about a second of it he’ll lose track of where he is and what’s happening and everything that ever happened or what he even is.
But loss is loss, and Lucifer was everything he had, for so long. He wants Lucifer away from him, in the Cage, or dead, oh he would dance on Lucifer’s fucking grave, celebrate, feel safer in a way not even dimensional differences can grant him a reprieve to. But he knows, also, there’s a part of him that’d grieve.
It’s not real, not something that makes sense, makes him hate Lucifer even more because he was back as a hallucination and maybe Sam did feel some bittersweet fucked up kind of way, but then he was tortured and mocked and played within a matter of seconds. And the fact Cas is disgusted with him for it, it’s too much,
Neither of them are talking, just letting that accusation sit in the air. They both know it’s true, but they also know that truth is a putrid, damaged thing. A straw, rather than a knife, to break the camel’s back.
“I’m sorry to ask again, but Sam? Did you have feelings for me before the Cage?” Cas asks. Sam’s eyes are screwed shut. It’s a guilt he can’t really handle right now. He couldn’t, before, either, not even in the Cage sometimes, feeling like Cas was somehow being defiled because Lucifer would take his form because of how Sam felt.
The fact Cas had to know, see, in Sam’s head, all because of Sam’s feelings for him? It leaves him feeling barren, skinned, vulnerable in his chest. Rejected and bleeding heart heartbroken. But it also leaves him so sick and guilty and ashamed of himself. Like he betrayed Cas with these feelings Lucifer got him to admit, so easily, through torture, even if in the end Lucifer didn’t need the admission when he also could just look right into Sam’s brain.
“Yes,” he admits, since apparently, Cas does need an answer. He keeps his eyes closed, and there’s a light show in his eyelids. It’s less disorienting than the fairies on the ceiling.
“That’s...” Cas sounds genuinely sad, when he says, “A tragedy.”
Sam scoffs. That almost sounds like sympathy.
The world feels like it’s tilting, and he feels arms around him, and it’s terrifying, too much, his entire system already is such intense high geared terror and revulsion. He tries to clear his vision desperately, make sense of what’s happening, and it takes a second to register it’s Cas.
Cas’s arms and legs are around Sam wrapped up like he’s something precious, but everything Cas said is so fresh in his mind, he can barely think.
“How can you touch me?” Sam asks, confused and appalled, twisting to find Cas’s arms up, almost like he’s doing the “surrender” gesture, except his hands are perpendicular instead of parallel. It tugs something at Sam’s heart, especially with the futility of his body still very much touching Sam’s.
“You said I could,” Cas defends hastily.
“Yeah,” Sam says. He remembers that. The room starts to filter in more, and he feels remarkably more lucid. Like a layer of confusion had been lifted, another jolt of Cas’s grace through his system after a concussion.
“I’m sorry. Do you need some physical distance between us now?” Cas asks. Sam shakes his head. He thinks it’s half the truth, but he doesn’t think he can bear the change anyways. He feels poisonous, revolting, but soothed. It makes him feel selfish.
“Don’t stay on my behalf.” Sam says, and it comes out caustically bitter. He feels himself tremble. His body feels weak and porcelain. He’s an overripe fruit, rotten to the core, and so fucking easy to bruise.
“I want to be of help,” Cas says. It doesn’t clarify anything. Sam supposes Cas’s pity outweighs his disgust. But he’s so grateful. Maybe he was made to be a whore for sympathy.
He wants to ask Cas if he hates him. He wishes Cas was still in his mind, so he could answer. Because Sam’s not going to ask out loud. He can’t.
“Look, I don’t mean to disturb you. I’m sure you have other things you’d like to be doing.”
“There’s nowhere else I’d rather be,” Cas says. The sincerity of that glitters in a burning chasm where Sam’s chest should be.
“Even if I miss him?” Sam scoffs. He can’t say his name. He’s not sure why he said that. His brain still feels elastic. He feels pinpricks and slices up his arms. There’s some lurking certainty Lucifer is the corner of his eye, waiting, wondering why Sam isn’t begging him to find a new 10. Then laughing when Sam offers to hurt and humiliate himself to avoid it.
He thinks of Lucifer talking about Cas, Lucifer using Sam’s feelings for Cas to hurt Sam more. How Lucifer got off on it. Sam’s so caught up in his own profound shame he misses what Cas says.
“What?” Sam asks. He doesn’t remember what he last said. His brain feels glitchy in green and dark grey static.
“You miss Lucifer?” Cas repeats, causing Sam to flinch in his arms. He bites his tongue to hold back a slurry of pleading apologies.
Is Cas taunting him? Testing him? Is his brain shrinking, expanding, shivering out masses of comprehension? He thinks of a friend’s trampoline he and Dean played on one summer. They were only in town a couple of weeks, but there were water balloons underneath. Sam lay looking down with the sun beating on him, and he felt dizzy.
He doesn’t understand the flash of the memory. It stings and burns, knives on his back, sliced and touched, twisting all retrospect into Lucifer’s image. He can reach through it though, a little bit. Playing with his friend made his heart so big to shatter when he left. Lucifer had laughed at that. And taunted, but didn’t confirm, if the kid had been possessed.
“Sam?”
“I hate him.” It’s the full fucking truth because he can bandage it all up real nice, in gold-coated paper all flaky.
“I do too,” Cas says. “Are you okay?” It’s very silly. But Cas sounds so tentative and unsure it’s kind of sweet. Sam can’t quite parse out his change in mood, but in some ways, it’s nice to know the truth. The way people treat him, the buoy back and forth. How they actually see them.
It’s kind of like he’d been holding his breath, waiting for someone to finally acknowledge the truth and see him for what he is.
Shame and terror ate him alive. He’s just like Jeffrey, in some ways. It’s not like he has changed either. He even let the hallucination of the devil into his bed if only to find Dean. When in reality, what could he have known that Sam couldn’t?
He can’t stand the idea. He can’t stand the fact Cas is still touching him, holding him. It’s vulgar. Their proximity. It tastes dirty and rotten at the back of Sam’s throat. He’s glad Cas sees him. It’s the worst he was waiting for. It was the thought under every thought.
It’s okay. Sam accepts it. It’s nice. He can stop living in turmoil, stop trying to justify or excuse himself.
He sees himself. It’s clear. It’s settled. He feels a sick acceptance and a horrible burning behind his tongue.
He’s still spacing out. Notices when Cas pulls back, gives him space, but not in the interim when he must leave and come back with water. Did he ask for that? The memory’s hazy. Maybe Cas just anticipated his needs.
Sam feels a desperate need to debase himself for Cas, but he knows he doesn’t need to do that anymore. He can’t think clearly enough to trace where those feelings come from.
He drinks the water fast -- like blood swirling down the drain (deep gulps racing) -- it drips down the corner of his mouth (like walking along train tracks in the summertime). He holds the green plastic cup reverent. He feels small, and his mind flickers like fast-moving sun-washed pine needles.
It’s not really until then that Sam realises he doesn’t get to die. The grief and horror of that choke him. He feels hands around his throat, real hands around his throat. He doesn’t think it counts as a hallucination though. It’s hardly an uncommon sensory memory of his to playback.
He realises he really thought it all along, that it was either a matter of time until Lucifer ended this delusion or a matter of time until it killed him. Cas keeps saving him. But not in the way Sam had wanted him to.
He’s lying down somewhere in the haze, and Cas is still there. Sam desperately wants Cas to stay there.
He remembers, if it weren’t for Cas, he’d still be in the cage. His soulless body led Dean’s desperation to Death. He reminds himself of this, as he feels disgusted by Cas’s vessel’s pelvis’ proximity to him.
Sam feels hyperaware of a certain type of angelic thrum Cas gives off now that he doesn’t think he could sense as present before. He craves the way it makes his chest buzz with terror.
--
He wakes up later, and Cas is still there. He offers Sam more water in that same little cup. Sam takes it eagerly, and notices a new clarity in his thoughts. It feels like fatigue and fear.
He can’t really parse out all of what was concrete and true and real, but he really doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t need to think about it.
“Gotta get back on Dick,” Sam says, and he cringes at the innuendo as it’s out of his mouth. “I just mean, we’ve wasted so much time on my brain breaking, we’ve kind of lost track of the whole ‘monsters taking over the United States’ thing.”
“I got you and Dean some food from rural Cyprus,” Cas says, “It will be safe to eat.”
For some reason, it stings, that Cas went to a whole other country without him. He nods. It’s kind of novel he can still feel irrationally hurt like that. Then again, every time Dean looks at him overwhelmed and judgmental cause Sam’s two seconds away from losing his mind, it still hurts. Torture clearly doesn’t make Sam immune to feeling petty.
He just sort of thought Cas would stay. What if Sam woke up and left and drained a demon?
He pulls out his laptop. Tries to catch up with what Roman’s been up to. It burns behind his eyes to try to read, the blue light.
They spend the next few days doing that. Cas hovers around Sam, always leaving enough room to flee. Sam can’t bear his presence. He avoids him. He knows in Cas’s heart of hearts he prefers that. Cas feels guilty, and he doesn’t want to face it anyways.
Cas looks at him and sees what Sam did with Lucifer.
Sam doesn’t need Cas’s pity. And Dean’s eyeing Sam enough, watching for any signs of imminent relapse, for the both of them.
They still need to move around.
And sometimes objects move. Sometimes Sam randomly feels cold.
He’s convinced Bobby’s around. But he doesn’t need to encourage any more psychosis.
--
One day, Cas sits with Sam for a while. Sam’s trying to read some grating text badly scanned in a language he has to translate, and it’s hard to focus on it enough to ignore Cas. He feels unpleasant horrifying memories across his body. He wonders what visual imagery is layered over him when Cas stares at him.
“What’s up, Cas,” Sam eventually says. He realises he’s kind of being a dick. He was so caught up in his own disconnection he forgot how much Cas has been suffering too. He should be nicer.
“I know you don’t like it when I use the information I found while possessing you, but I need to tell you something,” Cas says. Right to it, Sam guesses, and feels dizzy with inertia.
“Okay,” Sam says. It’s not, and there’s a razor lodged in his chest, but what’s he supposed to say? Shut up? He’s got enough presence to himself now not to beg Cas.
There’s no one alive who can hurt him now as Cas can.
“You didn’t deserve Hell,” Cas says. He seems fidgety and there’s an airy sense in his posture, the way he’s holding his hands together.
Sam wasn’t expecting that.
It takes him a second to compute.
“Look, Cas, it’s nice of you that you’re trying to comfort me, but it’s okay I understand--”
“No, you don’t,” Cas says.
“You feel guilty and you want to, want to tell me what I want to hear. You want to try to fix me, but it’s really not your fault I’m like this. The wall was going to break. You’re forgiven.”
“Just because you want to hear it doesn’t mean it’s incorrect,” Cas says, but he’s smiling, and he doesn’t smile that much. So Sam guesses he must have said something Cas wanted to hear too. “You helped bring down the Apocalypse. I also see now how little power you had in your role in starting it. You need to hear it.”
It’s the way he states it all like it’s factual, no room for argument. Sam feels like he can’t breathe.
It makes him realise he doesn’t want Cas to try to therapise him. He just wants his friend back.
“Sam, you need to believe me. I thought I had raised you from the cage. It was the first thing I did.”
It feels too much, the onslaught of emotions. Sam remembers how heartbroken Cas looked when Sam accused him of bringing him back soulless, so he nods. Cas might have failed, but he tried. And for some reason that retrospect does help. It brings some comfort to what happened.
“I know, Cas. Thank you,” Sam says.
Cas falls silent again for a while, but he doesn’t leave. There’s clearly still something on his mind, and Sam’s scared to hear what. There’s a “but” coming; Sam’s just sure of it.
Finally, Cas breaks the silence again.
“Do you see me the same as you see him?”
Sam freezes. Somehow dancing around this subject feels icier than keeping a plane of glass between himself and everything he wanted to hear.
He has to ask, even though he is terrified of the answer.
“Uhm, who?”
“Lucifer,” Cas adds, without any hesitancy. But there’s an intense angst shadowing his face.
“Of course not,” Sam responds, equally as fast. His heart is beating in his throat. It feels like the worst kind of betrayal, to even think of Lucifer and Cas like that in the same thought. “You’re family, Cas.”
Sam’s not sure if Cas is also thinking of when Lucifer said he was Sam’s true family.
But Cas seems satisfied with the answer.
“Can I ask you something else?”
“I mean, you just did, but yeah.”
“Would you still like to kiss me?”
It’s funny, how after everything Sam can still feel so soul-crushingly embarrassed. He checks over his shoulder fast, on instinct, wishing Cas would keep his voice down.
He also hates that Cas asked these two questions so close to one another.
“Shouldn’t you know. You were in my head.”
“I can’t read your mind now. Or I could, but I don’t think you’d want me to.”
“It’s just, uh, Cas, look-- I don’t. I don’t think I want to talk about that.”
“So that’s a no?”
“Not, not exactly,” Sam says. He understands Cas’s curiosity, but he feels dissected. He’s had enough of his insides on display. It feels cruel, mocking.
Of all the things to matter to him, unrequited love seems like the silliest and most novel to cut upon little sections of his chest. But Lucifer, the things his mind showed Cas. The context of it all. It’s horrifying.
He doesn’t want to talk about this at all. He wants to go back to them avoiding each other.
“So do you want me to kiss you?”
He hates being forced to admit things. Lucifer would do it, so often, make a show of it, make it humiliating and horrific and bad. Make it shape whatever is left of Sam today. He hates that Cas is doing this to him as well. There can’t be a way Cas isn’t aware of how Sam feels. Maybe he just needs the ego boost, but it’s not a nice thing to make Sam do.
Sam nods. The word gets trapped in his throat like crumbled up sticky note. Lucifer would loved the sound of it. He wouldn’t accept a nod. He’d hurt him, make Sam shame himself further. It’d be a cop-out. He’d--
Cas kisses him. Sam is so shocked and overwhelmed, he kisses back before even processing it. He forgets he’s allowed to do anything else.
He wants to fight or flee, feels terrified, paralysed in his fear response.
He realises in the midst of it that this is Cas and he can stop, except if it is Cas this is special and it doesn’t matter if he doesn’t want it or not, he must want it, he can’t fuck this up just because he’s traumatised.
It’s just that he was soulless, and then the two people he kissed since he didn’t want to, and it’s just, more than he expected.
He turns very still, because he can’t pull away and he can’t stop, but also he can’t move when his head feels like this.
Cas does though, eventually. He looks at Sam, and he’s all lit up and relaxed in a way Sam would hate to take away. Cas doesn’t notice the turmoil under Sam’s skin immediately though. Now that Cas isn’t in his head, Sam remembers he has the most armour from Cas of anyone. Sam gives a little smile and hopes Cas reads it as more than it is.
And then it hits him what’s probably happening.
This is the moment.
Lucifer’s going to pull the curtain away now.
None of this was ever real.
Sam can’t look at Cas. He’s too scared his face will morph into Lucifer’s.
“Did I... did I do it right?” Cas asks, and he sounds tentative. It’s endearing. It pulls at Sam’s heart. He hates this.
“It was unexpected,” Sam admits, realises that’s a little morbid, and adds, “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Unexpected? But I asked you first?”
“No you didn’t?”
“Yes, I did,” Cas insists indignantly.
Sam takes a breath in, tries to clear his mind. Oh.
Is Sam really that fucked up that even when his best friend asks for explicit consent to kiss him, Sam thinks he’s being mocked?
Sam still can’t look at Cas.
“Oh, sorry, yeah. Thanks for that, Cas,” Sam says.
“I’m sorry,” Cas says, and Sam must have failed somewhere along the way. “I can’t seem to stop screwing up.”
“No, no Cas,” Sam feels overwhelmed. This is exactly what he didn’t want but he still can’t look at Cas because he’s truly half certain Lucifer is watching this right now and laughing at him.
“Do you see me as Lucifer now?” Cas asks. It makes Sam look up to Cas immediately, half convinced he’ll see Lucifer.
“Of course not,” Sam says. Cas doesn’t look reassured, this time.
“I know I made you kill like he did. But I’d never want.... I never wanted to hurt you, Sam,” Cas says.
“I know,” Sam says. It’s starting to make sense, though. The in-dimension reason why Cas would kiss him. Guilt and pity.
A sick and evil part of Sam is disappointed that he didn’t even get to enjoy it.
“Look, I meant what I said okay? I know you got a direct line to my anger issues or whatever, but I am grateful for what you did. You were trying to help, and you know I’d much prefer have a broken brain than Lucifer topside again.”
“Okay,” Cas says. “I’m glad I could fix it. It makes sense why I had to be brought back to life. To save you.”
Sam doesn’t know how to tell Cas how insignificant that actually is.
“I don’t know why you were resurrected, but I am very grateful,” Sam says. A silly, irrational thought corners in his head like. Maybe God was listening to his prayers. “But whatever the reason, your life has a lot more significance than getting me to stop hallucinating.”
For a second, he feels a wave of genuine euphoric happiness. Cas is back. Cas is back!
“You don’t understand how I devastated Heaven,” Cas says. “I’m sure there are many angels who wish to kill me.”
Sam thinks of the voicemail in his mind. It’s not a nice feeling, your family wanting to kill you. He thinks of a knife in Cas’s back and feels sickly.
“You weren’t... you weren’t yourself though, Cas.”
“That’s only partially true,” Cas says. “I’m sure I’ll find retribution when I return to Heaven,” he adds, except he says it longingly.
Sam feels frozen and terrified again, like he always does when he’s certain one wrong word and his brother will end up dead by his own hand. He wants to plead with Cas, tell him to never leave his side, then keep him safe safe safe safe safe. He just got him back. But he has no right to do that.
“You facing retribution helps nothing,” he says instead. Because it’s the thing that would be the most convincing to himself. “We should, uh, well maybe you could help us with the leviathan problem?”
He isn’t trying to guilt trip Cas. He just wants Cas to have a focus that isn’t going to end up with Cas dead again. He just wants Cas safe. But nothing’s ever ever safe.
Neither Cas nor Sam has ever really been adept at saving each other.
“Of course, I’ll do whatever I can to be of help.”
Sam smiles.
“I know you will Cas.”
They don’t talk for a few minutes, but Sam isn’t really able to return to thinking about the translation work he’s been doing. He’s not sure if there’s something more Cas wants to say. He feels emotionally drained, but also very giddy. He’s missed Cas.
“Do you want to kiss me again?” Cas eventually asks. Sam has to catch his breath. Because he does, now, he really does. He wants to memorise it and keep it close to his chest and make it special special special no matter what happens. It’s infuriating, that he didn’t before. He wants another chance. He didn’t do it right.
“Look, Cas, I get that you found out about... how I feel in less than great circumstances. But you really don’t need to kiss someone because you feel guilty or sorry for them.”
You can quit ignoring the elephant in the room. You can admit that even looking at me disgusts you.
Sam can’t even fathom what it must be like for someone to kiss him knowing what he’s done.
“I do feel guilty and sorry for you, but that’s not why I want to kiss you,” Cas says. Sam forces back a scoff. His bitterness isn’t a good look. So he keeps quiet. “I like how it feels.”
“And getting a download of my time in hell inspired you to try?”
Sam says it as a joke, but he realises that maybe that’s exactly what happened.
He feels pricky and ashamed, and his skin feels tight and hot. He’s been caught up in his own feelings of shame and humiliation that it didn’t occur to him that maybe that’s not what Cas would feel when seeing it at all.
Maybe it just turned him on.
Sam is spiralling, fast.
“What does hell have to do with this? You told me you had feelings for me before hell.”
“You, you didn’t,” Sam says. He’s not thinking very clearly. He wants to beg Cas to explain just what changed his mind.
“I did,” Cas says. It’s jarring. Sam’s nearly certain it’s a lie, which makes him feel coiled and panicky.
“No, no, I’m...” Sam doesn’t know how to express himself. He’s just the demon blood addict who started the Apocalypse. He’s a lot of bad things, he knows that, and now Cas sees it all flayed out in detail. Sam’s head feels foggy and cold and the mist won’t wipe off the windshield. Cas is Dean’s friend, for fuck’s sake. Just because Sam couldn’t help but love him too doesn’t mean anything. “Cas, it’s okay. I can handle rejection.”
It's not like Sam is actually Lucifer.
“You inspired me to question everything I knew. You’re undeniably good and went against everything I was supposed to believe in, but it didn’t make it any less true. You saved the world and the first thing I did was try to save you from Hell after. I love you, and I want to kiss you again. Is that bad? Does that make me like him?”
Sam can’t breathe right. He feels slightly hysterical. He could not have pictured this, avoiding Cas, overwhelmed by the forced intimacy they had to save him. He feels insane.
“This, this isn’t going to fix me either, Cas. You don’t need to do this.”
Cas doesn’t look satisfied with that as an answer.
“I just wanted you to know,” he says.
And then he disappears into thin air.
--
Cas doesn’t return that day, enough for Dean to take bitter note of it. Sam feels like he’s fucked something up in a really big way. But Cas couldn’t have been serious, could he?
Maybe Sam’s hallucinating. Maybe Sam did something even worse to fuck this all up. He doesn’t know how to handle this, handle how he could be hurting Cas now like he was hurting Cas when Cas was in his brain when everything is still sizzling and sparkling undone and surreal inside him.
He thinks maybe he’s supposed to be happy or something, but the idea this is both real and not some sort of joke or hallucination or misunderstanding and fear of the hope of it all is too overwhelming.
After two days of radio silence from Cas, Sam gives out a tentative prayer. Two days is objectively nothing in regards to Cas’s tendency to disappear, but Cas’s comments about facing retribution in Heaven have Sam on high alert. He doesn’t want to lose him again, not like that.
Cas shows up a few moments later. He’s on the absolute opposite end of the room as Sam. Sam wonders if he did it on purpose.
“Hello, Sam,” he says, quietly. He doesn’t exactly meet Sam’s eyes.
Sam’s not sure how to move forward now that Cas is here. He’s been thinking about it nonstop. Apologies, for forcing Cas to get a headful of guilt-tripping horrifying nonsense. He thinks he would if he had the words. He never meant to do that to Cas. He just didn’t really have the choice.
“Look, Cas, I’m sorry you had to see a lot of the shit going on in my head. I know we need to work out how to move forward, but if that means you needing to get away I get it.”
“The contents of your psyche don’t bother me,” Cas says. They both know that’s not the truth. Sam looks down. Even if it weren’t a matter of the horror show that is the inside of Sam’s brain, Sam knows with certainty Cas can’t handle the guilt.
“I know things are awkward, knowing how I feel,” Sam says, and it’s not till then he realises he’s avoiding the rest. It’s easier to say that than to actually say the deep well of disgust and shame existing within him.
Cas sees him, doesn’t he? Cas sees him for what he is.
“I don’t,” Cas says.
“Sorry?”
“I don’t know how you feel.”
“Cas, you were in my head.”
“You’re very contradictory and troubled. I don’t always understand it.”
That kind of hurts. Sam’s not sure why. It’s not like Cas is wrong.
“So, we’re good then?”
For the first time in a while, Cas seems really bitter at him.
“Yes. We’re ‘fine’.”
“Cas...”
“Dean is still angry at me too. I should keep my distance.”
“I don’t want that.”
“Then what do you want?”
Sam feels frozen in his tracks now. This is suddenly more difficult than he thought. He picks at the peeling paint on the old desk he’s sitting at. What does he want? Well, he wants to be dead. He wants to never have existed at all. But that’s not helpful.
“Dick Roman, the leviathans. I want them handled. For the world, for Bobby.”
“So you want me here because you require my help fighting the leviathan? Surely you’ve been made aware angels don’t have much power against them.”
That’s not what Sam meant.
“I do want you here, Cas,” Sam says. And he sees how he has been troubled and contradictory. It’s hard to be in the same room as him. But him just disappearing for a couple of days? Far off potentially fulfilling his suicidal penance plan? It’s terrifying.
Cas doesn’t seem satisfied with that.
Things were in some ways quite a lot easier when he was just in Sam’s head.
“I betrayed your trust when I caused the wall in your head to break, and I betrayed your trust again when I possessed you. You have no reason to want me around.”
“It’s okay, Cas. You were trying to help. I get it. And I get if you don’t want to be around me knowing all you do, but I’m, well I’m sure Dean’s going to come around. And,” Sam’s not sure where he’s going with this. “You really don’t need to tell me things you think I want to hear.”
“I’m not.”
There’s little bits of hope, the kind that Sam didn’t think he’d ever feel again, eating up his chest. He’s been trying to sway them away. It feels necrotic.
“Sam, I did mean what I said the other day,” Cas clarifies. He seems really sad when he says it. It’s not until then that Sam realises Cas thinks Sam rejected him.
“You don’t have to... you have to know I do want you,” Sam says. He doesn’t think through if it’s true when he says it, if he’s even capable of wanting Cas anymore. It just feels like a universal truth to him at this point. Like breathing.
Then he imagines Cas fucking him, and it’s a spike of terror in his system that he immediately tosses aside.
“I do love you,” he says, and the words feel heavy and weighted and awkward on his tongue. He forces himself to say it almost like an amendment.
It seems so stupid and meaningless, wrapping himself up in this after everything they’ve both been through. There’s no way they can start a relationship like this. There’s no way Sam could ever trust Cas is doing this out of anything but guilt. There’s no way it would be good for them, how fucked up Sam is. How fragile and fraught everything feels.
But the thing is, Sam really thought he’d never see Cas again. Everything has been horrifying, a test of endurance, everything he’s breathing through. But Cas is here with him, and he thinks it’s a sunburst of significance in his fractured brain mosaic.
“Do you want to kiss me again?” Cas asks. Sam should say no. It’s incongruent, to everything that’s been happening. It’s dangerous. But the thing is he doesn’t want to say no. He just wants to have a single moment with Cas. Something neither time nor Lucifer can take away.
He nods silently. Let Cas make the first move. Knowing what’s happening and knowing he can stop makes his chest light up.
He kisses Cas, and this time it does light up pleasure in by his gut. It’s Cas, and he’s here and he’s alive, and he said he loves Sam, and for a second Sam just doesn’t care about anything else. So what if it’s out of place or not the point or ill advised given everything that has happened in their lives?
He’s not disconnected, in this moment. He feels alive.
It’s bizarre, and it’s like hope glowing tensioned and bright. He doesn’t want this to be something that what Lucifer did to him or what the horror of existence has led them both to can take away. Why can’t he have this? Why can’t he feel lucky and happy and hopeful?
The degree of selfishness is jarring. He pulls away in shock.
Cas is smiling though. Like he’s happy. The joy inside Sam feels insidious.
Lucifer’s going to take this all away. It was a test, to once again prove Sam and what he wants and what he’ll do are desperate and evil.
Cas has seen what Lucifer did to him. There’s no way any of this is logical or right.
Sam’s so ashamed. And unremorseful.
“Th-thank you, thank you, Cas,” he says.
Sam can devote himself back to his life of focus on high-stakes terror now. He’ll hold onto this.
It makes Sam wonder if there is another way the world could have gone. If he were just a slightly different person. If he hadn’t let Lucifer out, hadn’t gone to the cage, hadn’t had to have everything that has happened to him and that he’s done occur. If maybe then he and Cas, well. If maybe Cas could have wanted him.
It’s ridiculous. Sam can barely trace where they’ve been or what’s been happening for months now. He doesn’t feel real. Cas doesn’t feel real. Nothing does. What right does he have to think silly escapist hopeless romantic bullshit?
What would Dean think, if he knew?
What would Lucifer?
All this adds is another level of tragedy and shame.
“We should do that as much as possible,” Cas says. Sam chuckles sadly.
“I don’t think either of us are in a good place to start a new relationship.”
“Does that matter?” Cas asks. He seems so sincere. Sam can’t deny the levity he feels just being around him again. Crystal aqua cool and sweet.
Sam looks at Cas’s lips. He wants to kiss them again. The desire doesn’t feel scary. It just feels wrong.
“I think it does,” Sam says. What’s happened to them is fucking with them both. And they’re clinging to whatever they can. It probably shouldn’t be each other.
“Why?” Sam’s at a loss. He wasn’t expecting to explain it this much. “Do you not trust me?”
“No, Cas, that’s not it,” Sam says.
“Shouldn’t we do what makes us happy?” Cas says. It’s a stark contrast to the fear building inside Sam of Cas getting hurt on some mission for penance and suffering.
Maybe they can cling just a bit. What does Sam know of healthy intimacy?
“Maybe Cas,” Sam says. He knows he’s going to give in. He feels it. It terrifies him because he’s not sure if he’s capable of doing anything Cas would want of him. He wasn’t sure if he could even kiss him. And he doesn’t trust Cas’s headspace. He doesn’t trust anything.
He feels some bubbling form of content, when Cas takes to lay beside him at night. Cas doesn’t try to keep him awake as his hallucination did.
They have to keep moving, a new bed every few nights, leviathans still around.
Sam feels so warm beside Cas. He wasn’t sure if he could do this either. Even if sometimes he wakes up in panic.
Sometimes he’ll just sleep in Cas’s arms and philosophise the impossibility of anything that’s happened, try to track it together. Try to make sense of the logic in this little play of a horror show Lucifer could have put on. Being there, with Cas, it can light Sam’s brain up with hope. And there’s a false security, that wraps up deep and comforting, sickly in his chest.
It means something, and he hopes to God it’s real.
But he’s pretty sure he’s never going to feel safe.