Disclaimer: I don't own Supernatural.

"...through me you enter into the city of woes
through me you enter into eternal pain,
through me you enter the population of loss.

abandon all hope, you who enter here."

-Dante, Inferno

Lucifer slipped his fingers beneath the skin of Sam's abdomen and peeled it away like wet paper. Blood dripped from the flap of skin, and every breath—every slight tensing of his muscles—sent fresh currents of pain through him.

"Isn't it amazing," Lucifer said, mirth in his voice heard as clearly as the boom of the thunder of the unending storm around the cage, "how it hurts no matter how many times I painstakingly peel away that pesky flesh of yours?"

Sam clenched his teeth together to the point that he wasn't sure if he'd be able to open his mouth again.

"I know, I know. It feels like I've done this a hundred times, but why not start with the classics and get creative later?" Lucifer asks. "Time is one thing that we aren't short on."

Sam never honored him with a response. Never gave him the satisfaction of acknowledgment. It was the one power he had. The one show of freedom left.

But it hurt, and it never stopped hurting. There was no deal to tempt him. No seal to break by bloodshed. No end in sight.

"Time feels different here, too," Lucifer said, pacing behind Sam's… soul. His body was elsewhere, off to the side of The Cage. "You have no idea how long we've been here, do you? Your concept of time is thrown off. Has it been a day in the land of the living, or a decade? Who knows? Well, I do, of course."

Sam let his head fall to the side, staring at his physical body that had separated from him during the descent, stripped away like a layer no longer needed. He wondered if this is what the ghosts he hunted during his life felt like, staring at their own body unable to believe that it once belonged to them. That it was once more than a useless husk.

Without his soul to inhabit it, it was nothing. It was being eaten away by the climate of The Cage, fraying at the edges like the threads of a woven blanket.

"Come on, Sam! We're stuck together for an eternity. A little chit-chat isn't going to kill you. Not when you're already dead," Lucifer said. "Dean isn't here to interrupt us. He's off having the life that you always dreamed of."

Sam pursed his lips together. Lucifer could inflict as much torment upon him as he wished. He could make this eternity the definition of Hell.

But he could not make Sam obey.

He would not talk.

Sometimes he heard echoes of Hell clamor their way down to The Cage tucked away in the abyss. The agonized screams and crying of names of people who would never come to the rescue. The crying for mercy that would never be shown. Their humanity was being picked away. The creation of demons.

Other times he heard nothing. Absolute silence that left him wondering if any part of this torment was true, or if it was all false punishment imagined by his own mind. The Cage would darken until he felt that he was trapped in an endless void. Perhaps the taunting echoes of Lucifer's mocking laugh were made up.

He didn't know which he preferred. He didn't know which Lucifer preferred. Though as long as he was miserable, Lucifer was content.

Loneliness or pain, did it matter anymore?

Michael was somewhere. He had to be, but Sam never saw him. He never saw Adam either, neither his soul nor his body. He could only hope that Adam's fate was better than his own, not that it took much to accomplish that.

His arms were strung up behind him, his shoulders having dislocated long ago to leave him hanging from demented arms. Lucifer circled him with slow steps, tapping a rusted meat-hook against one of his palms.

"Have you ever been strung up and pulled down at the same time?" Lucifer asked, his words forming as mist from his mouth, turning into ice crystals in the subzero temperatures of The Cage. "Fighting with gravity?"

Despite the frozen atmosphere of The Cage, Sam felt like he was on fire. Immersed in flames and burned without an end in sight.

A pathetic moan escaped his lips, but he wasn't sure whether it was in answer to Lucifer or a reaction bubbling up from his days with a physical body.

His physical body finished evaporating a long time ago, eaten away by The Cage, unable to hold up in a world of demons and damned souls.

"Oh, he can still make sound," Lucifer said. "But you don't want to talk to me, do you? I don't like the silence anymore than you do, Sam. Let's bond. Share our life stories."

"Never," Sam said.

"So you say, but one word is a start. Not a great start. We won't worry about that right now, though. There's plenty of time to work out our differences."

Sam rolled his eyes. He might be stuck with Lucifer, but he didn't have to give into what he wanted.

His willpower was all he had left.

Lucifer hummed a song Sam didn't recognize. An archaic song with haunting notes. It was moments like that when he remembered that Lucifer was a much ancient creature than Sam could comprehend. Although, Sam was starting to feel ancient himself from the amount of time he'd been suspended in The Cage.

"I don't like being here any more than you do, Sam," Lucifer said.

Somewhere along the line, he slipped into speaking Enochian more than English.

Somewhere along the line, Sam realized he could understand one language as well as the other.

Lucifer leaned over him and held up his hand, thumb and forefinger barely parted. "I was this close to having everything I wanted. And you and that brother of yours had to go and ruin it."

Sam felt blood drip from his lips when he opened his mouth. The merciless bed of nails upon which Lucifer trapped him mutilated his body in a thousand places. It wasn't new, but it hurt just as much every time.

The days of tortured melded into one another, if one could count days as a proper form of the passage of time in Hell.

"You ruined it!" Lucifer yelled.

The Cage responded to Lucifer's rage, leaving Sam with a dreadful feeling and the sensation that he was drowning (if he could drown while dead). The bars defined themselves clearly and burned white-hot, and Sam thought that this was the first time he saw them at all. The heat pierced the normally frigid air of The Cage and drew screams from Sam, no matter how hard he tried to hold them back.

Lucifer laughed.

"There we go!" he said. "Progress, finally. I'll get you to talk, Sammy. Even if I have to force the words out of you."

Sam wished he could black out and pretend that none of this was happening.

He wished that he could have the allure of a deal lingering within his grasp.

Instead, he had an eternity with Lucifer, and nothing else in sight.

A/N: This is a prequel to a story that I've been chipping away at for a very, very long time. A story that follows an alternate Post-Hell timeline. I don't plan on posting it and devoting my full writing time to it until after I finish my current on-going stories, but if this prequel somehow gets an absurd amount of love, I might toss up the first chapter as a bit of a teaser at least.