Chapter Text
Waking up in a dark room with his hands bound to a chair is not something new for Sam. But this is the first time he can’t recall what led to him being here. His hands are zip tied to the arms of the chair and thick rows of rope go around his chest keeping him upright. The ties are a bit on the tighter side, his fingers are beginning to feel tingly, but he is relatively sure he would be able to break out of them once he gets a bit more clarity. His head is fuzzy and aching, and he’s covered in blood.
The last thing he remembers is passing out drunk on the steering wheel of his stolen car after finishing up the case. The truck is warded with enough power to repel an army of demons and seraphs, so it can’t have been them. Did the werewolf have a pack? It looked like the work of a lone wolf, but it’s possible that he missed something and now his family wanted payback. Sam scoffs lightly. He knows a thing or two about revenge. It never ends well. This whole pack will (probably) be dying in his hands today because of it.
But it isn’t until much later, when he is biting his tongue to keep the screams inside his throat, does he realize just how, once again, cocky and wrong he was.
Tim and Reggie have made good on their promise and come back for him, only this time with a lot more backup than he can handle. It’s almost funny that they think they need more than a dozen people in the building just to keep Sam hostage, four guys holding him down every time he’s unchained. They mean business and they’re not leaving anything up to chance. Hunters must have lined up at the chance to take him down.
They all seemed to have their own beef with him, seeking their pound of flesh, and Sam couldn’t even begrudge them for it. The guy who breaks all his fingers and toes, one by one, not saying a word or giving him a second of reprieve, has that look on his face, haunted eyes that have seen death up close. Anything he tries to say gets completely ignored like he can’t hear him at all. Grief and the blankness it causes is something Sam knows all too well. He is left alone in the cold and empty room for a few hours to watch his fingers swell and feel everything, losing his mind with no distractions. When he reaches the verge of passing out, the door opens again, a blonde young woman with angry eyes that remind him too much of Jo works him over with a metal bat, breaking both his kneecaps and his right hip. An eternity later, when Sam couldn’t move an inch of his body and prayed for death, they finally put him out of his misery and killed him.
Sometime later, he wakes up whole. And then Tim enters the dark room Sam is kept in and turns on the lights. He isn’t surprised to see Sam alive; they must have tried to kill him before. Sam isn't surprised either; He has tried and failed too. It was frustrating and disappointing to wake up again. Tim places a glass of blood in front of Sam, without a word. The message is clear. To avoid torture, he has to drink it. He wonders if this is how it was for Dean in hell, the way to a blackened soul disguised as the way out.
Sam tells Tim to go to hell.
Tim just chuckles and leaves. Sam soon finds out what that laugh meant, a bunch of guys come in and chain his hands to the ceiling until he is standing on the tip of his toes, a phantom pain from the fractures still fresh in his mind. His clothes are cut off except for his boxers, his struggles are easily overpowered, and a fearsome-looking whip comes into view.
“If you’re so stubborn about doing this the hard way, Sam, then I’m happy to do it. You took morning’s lessons like a champ”, he cracks the whip against the wall and the sound makes Sam flinch before he can stop it. “Let’s see how this one goes.”
Sam has never been whipped before. He gets the occasional beating, stabbing, or claw scratches, he’s even been shot a couple of times but never whipped. The little blades at the end of the whip scare him but he doesn’t give them the satisfaction of showing it.
His composure doesn’t last long.
By the thirty-third hit, he breaks his silence and tries to threaten them with a brother who had gone to hell and back for him, only to be laughed at and mocked; the knowledge of Dean washing his hands of him for good was old news to them. He changes tactics, pleading and trying to explain his side, only for them to point out every hole in his defense, seeing right through his weak excuses, just like Dean did.
Drinking demon blood looked like the best idea to Sam because deep inside he was fucked up and craved it subconsciously and went in the direction that suited him the most. It isn’t something normal humans who are in their right minds would choose.
It's not something you're doing, it's what you are. You're a monster.
Blood-sucking freak.
They are right. They must be right. There was no other explanation for it.
It doesn’t matter that he didn’t actually know what it was the first time Ruby got him to drink it. He was the one who chose to drink it again and again after that.
“If all you wanted was to help people, why not do it now? After all, it’s your fault the demons are running around rampant. Drink the blood and kill some of ‘em.”
Sam doesn’t tell them he’s an addict. He doesn’t tell them his eyes are capable of turning black. He doesn’t tell them the blood could irreparably change him into something inhuman, doesn’t tell them it already has.
“His buddy Satan probably wouldn’t like that”, one of the guys says.
All their eyes harden collectively at the statement as if they’re realising that Sam is the sole reason for all the evil in the world.
They aren't wrong. He is responsible for the oldest and biggest evil walking the earth. And he will be responsible for everything that happens because of that.
What you’ve done, what you still have to do... It’s too much for anyone to bear.
Sam wishes the weight on his shoulders was physical enough to crush him to death, but it isn’t.
The whip cracks again and Sam learns what it’s like to be a monster at the mercy of hunters.
They leave him alone for the rest of the night after he passes out from pain for the fourth time. Somewhere in between the darkness behind his eyelids and the darkness in front of him, Sam sleeps, hanging low from his wrists. He's been sleep-deprived for months and his bruised body gives into exhaustion far easier than usual. Lucifer waits for him in his dreams, healing his wounds and showing kindness, which is such a stark contrast to how his day had been.
Contrary to popular belief, Sam wasn’t a complete fool. He knows better than to fall for that act. Lucifer, patronizing as ever, tells him he will, sooner than he realizes.
He wakes up and wishes he hadn’t; wishes he had killed himself when he still had the chance.
Time moves funny, impossibly longer when he is awake, too short when he is not. Every day, Tim offers him the blood and every day he tells him, usually with the last reserves of his energy, to go to hell. Sam gets intimately acquainted with agony, his only constant companion in this shrouding darkness. He doesn’t remember a lot of what’s been done to him nor does he notice, but he knows the pain. He learned that the worse it got, the sooner they would kill him. And the longer the torture went on, in some messed up way, he began to find comfort in reaching his breaking point and looked forward to it, so he could have that few precious minutes of peace in death.
Lucifer heals him in his dreams with a feather-light caress on his cheek. Sam doesn’t like it, he doesn’t, but he would be lying to himself if he said it doesn’t feel good to have at least one being in the world who knows everything about him and still doesn’t hate him. Despite knowing better, the pain-induced fog he lives in doesn’t leave him enough cognitive space to acknowledge that Lucifer only acts kind because of his ulterior motive. He makes promises through Jessica’s lips to save him and Sam might’ve even taken the helping hand if he had known where he is. For all his defiance in the beginning, Lucifer’s grace shining through Jessica’s blue eyes is his only safe space now.
He doesn’t stop to think about what that says about him. He can’t afford to.
When they took too long to put a bullet through his heart, which was more than once, he knew just the right way to repeatedly bash his temple on the concrete to save them the trouble. Sadly, they kept his hands chained to the ceiling after they found out what he’d been doing.
Knowing he cannot die has changed Sam’s perception of survival completely, every instinct his father had carved into his nerves just doesn’t exist anymore. Once he realized there was no use in fighting back, no use in trying to reason with them, and no way to escape, all he cared about was getting through the pain and not breaking. It was surprisingly easy considering death and permanent injuries were out of the question.
His captors seem to know it too at some level, still, they never let up on the torture. Sam is merely a punching bag for them to take out their pain on and they make sure he knows that. They make sure he knows who he is, what he is, what he did, and what he deserves.
Sam never answers out loud to their rightful demands, and he doesn’t disagree with their accusations.
He screams Dean’s name sometimes, when he’s too out of it to care about his pride, truly believing his brother would come save him if he just called out his name loud enough.
On the rare occasion when he’s given the luxury of a small lamp, he will look down at himself, torn and frayed and scarred in a plethora of places, all glowing badges showing off his sins to the world.
Lucifer always left him with scars when he healed him. Sam doesn’t understand the logic behind it, he doesn’t have much time to think about it anyway. He doesn’t think about anything at all.
One day, when he’s too hurt to resist, Tim shoves the vial of blood down his throat. The last inch of control he was holding onto gets snatched away from him. He has nothing left. The pain has receded to the back of his mind, evaporated by the roaring power surging in his veins. His body sings with pleasure for the first time in God knows how long and Sam has never hated himself more than that moment for loving this so much.
They don't force him to use his powers. He is kept locked up and only when the shivers start does he realize what they are doing.
The hallucinations are particularly more cruel this time around and his seizures are strong enough to break both his wrists. Sam is not entirely sure if he didn't die sometime in between. He learns that staying upright while going through withdrawal makes it infinitely worse and by the time he reaches the end of it, he can’t feel his arms. He can’t feel much of anything. They hose him down to clean up the vomit and urine off of him and pour another vial of blood down his throat.
The week that follows is his own customized piece of hell; he is pretty sure even Lilith would've been kinder.
He lets himself cry his eyes out and blames it on the detox.
They dose him up and dry him out completely a few times just for shits and giggles, until his puke has more blood than bile, before coming to him with an offer. Sam doesn’t have to look up to smell the demon in the room with them.
“Come on, Sammy boy, you know what we want. Get on with it”, Reggie barks.
“Just kill this demon, Sam. There’s no need for you to go through all this”, Tim tells him kindly. They both seem to think that this good cop, bad cop routine was working for some reason. Sam will laugh if he can.
“Exorcizamus te, omnis immundus-”
Reggie backhands him and clutches his jaw harshly, nails breaking Sam’s skin, and tuts. “Don’t get cheeky with us now. Use your powers.”
“I don’t remember how.”
“You hear that, Tim? He doesn’t remember. I bet lying in his own filth for another couple of days will make him remember”
The demon snorts. “You got some balls talking to Lucifer’s true vessel like that.”
Sam tries not to flinch at being called that and almost fails. He’d been trying so hard to hide the entire truth from them.
“What?”, Tim asks, taken aback. Or maybe he is realizing they are in over their heads, just as Sam had tried to tell them many times.
“He’s the most valuable thing in all of Hell and Earth right now. He could say yes in his sleep, and our father would come here to whisk his precious meat suit away. Oh, and he’ll feed you all a plate of your own guts on his way out the door.”
The demon is dragged out of the room abruptly after that and Sam hears screams, but can’t make out any words. He’s left alone for a long time before the door to his room opens.
No emotion in the world is more powerful than fear. Sam can see the priorities have already shifted in Tim and Reggie’s eyes. This is no longer for revenge. They’re going to make him pay, not for what he did, but for what he was capable of doing.