Gemini (Supernatural Rewrite Sam x Reader x Dean)

Lazarus Rising

Your ragged nails dig into the soft cushion of the couch, and for one awful second, you are not in the living room anymore.

The fabric beneath your hands is gone. So is the afternoon light coming through the blinds, the low hum of the refrigerator from the kitchen, and the distant sound of a car passing somewhere outside. You are pulled under, and it is not the kind of dark that lets you rest. It presses in from every side while voices move around you, patient enough to wait because they have already learned there is nowhere for you to go.

They tell you to do it again.

Move the blade without touching it. Stop the screaming without using your hands. Make the thing in front of you break before it breaks you.

Hell was not only fire and chains, though there were plenty of both. Hell was lessons, repeated until your body started answering before you could decide whether you wanted it to. Pain when you refused. A few precious seconds without it when you listened. Every time you said no, they found another way to make the room smaller, another way to make your body forget it belonged to you, until reaching for whatever Yellow Eyes had left buried inside you became less of a choice and more of a reflex.

You remember the first time something moved without your hands.

Not clearly. Nothing from Hell comes back clearly anymore. Forty years have been broken apart and stored in pieces that surface whenever they feel like it, sometimes as images and sometimes as nothing more than heat crawling across your skin or the sudden taste of blood at the back of your throat. You remember Lilith somewhere nearby, telling you that humans were soft because they begged for pain to stop, while demons survived because they learned what pain could do. You remember refusing until your voice broke, and then refusing past that, until something across the room shattered so violently that pieces struck the walls.

The pain stopped afterward, but only for a few seconds. By then, a few seconds without it had already started to feel like something worth earning.

That was how they taught you.

Your fingers tighten around the couch cushion until your knuckles ache, and for a moment the soft fabric cannot convince your body that it is not something else. Your mind fills in what should be beneath your hands instead: broken nail beds, split fingertips, blood making everything slippery while someone tells you to try again. They never wanted you to escape. They wanted you to open yourself from the inside and reach willingly for the part of you that you had spent years pretending was not there.

Somewhere outside, a bird starts chirping.

The sound reaches you strangely, distant at first, and then all at once the room begins putting itself back together. The couch gives beneath your hands. The air conditioner is running. Warm afternoon light falls through the blinds and stretches across your bare legs, and your eyes stay fixed on it longer than they should.

You have been doing that since you came back.

Sunlight still catches you off guard.

There had been no mornings or afternoons where you were. No changing light on the walls, no weather moving past a window, no ordinary way to tell one day from another. Time had been measured by what they were doing to you, by how long they left you alone afterward, by whether Lilith came back before you had managed to sleep. Now the sun moves across the floor every day as though decades did not happen somewhere else while Earth carried on without you.