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Sam ate a live spider once. It was a stupid dare from Dean when he was seven that Sam regretted the instant he swallowed the poor creature. The rest of the night, Sam kept imagining it crawling around inside of him, biting and eating and probably having a million spider babies that would get bigger and bigger until his belly burst open and he was nothing but spiders.
He had recurring nightmares about it for a while. It started as a tickle, an itch in the back of his throat that he couldn’t cough out. Then it spread down towards his stomach, slowly growing wider and wider until his whole body was itching furiously with tiny spider legs crawling through his veins and intestines. The dream always ended with Sam scratching his stomach as hard as he could until he finally peeled away his skin to discover the teeming mass of spiders that came pouring out of the bloody hole he had just made.
He’s never really liked spiders since.
Jess was very careful around them, the type of kind-hearted person who gently trapped house spiders and released them outside. Sam loved her for it, loved the way she just made everything a bit better just by being herself. Sam wasn’t frightened of them, per se. He just preferred that they weren’t around.
Dean never had a problem with spiders, but he didn’t go out of his way to bring them to safety either. He mostly ignored them, which was pretty typical of Dean, Sam thinks. He ignored a lot of things, especially if it was convenient to him.
The bunker had a lot of spiders. It was cold and dark and didn’t really have natural light and there were always things scurrying in the corners. Sometimes when Sam was lying in bed, he’d remember that old nightmare and feel like little legs were touching him all over until he’d have to throw his covers off him and turn the light on and scratch himself until he was covered in red marks.
Lucifer had been delighted to discover Sam’s distaste for spiders. “A wonderfully mundane fear,” is what he called it. On the days (months? years?) when he and Michael were ignoring each other, he would devote himself to making Sam’s worst fears come true. Sam’s watched Dean’s body get devoured by hundreds of tiny crawling spiders while Dean begged Sam to stop hurting him more times than he could count.
Once when Lucifer was feeling particularly generous, pale, papery spiders ate away at Sam’s face until Sam could feel the unrelenting cold whistle through the gaps in his jaw. There’s nothing quite like the sensation of eight spindly legs crawling through one’s eye socket. It was a welcome change from Dean’s desperate pleas.
Lucifer had expected a particularly drawn-out show of gratitude for that.
The first few seconds Meg had been inside him reminded him of those old nightmares, those itches he couldn’t ever quite scratch. Sam had a moment of sudden shocky terror before he realized what was happening and she had slammed him away, locked inside his own mind. He’s not sure what was worse: the itch or the darkness. She hadn’t bothered with the fun little mind palace that Gadreel concocted while he used Sam’s body to murder Kevin.
The nightmares start up again after Dean dies. He dreams about Dean plenty. About that stupid fucking barn and that stupid fucking piece of rebar that punched his brother’s life right out of him. Intermixed with it are the cold nightmares, those nightmares from the Cage that never really went away, no matter how many blankets he wraps himself in or how many heating pads he puts in his bed.
The spider nightmares come back too. That deep, terrible itching. Sam itches as his hands push Dean onto the rebar. He itches as his hands strangle Kevin. He itches as he cuts up Adam piece by piece. He does horrible, awful things in his dreams as those pin-prick feet crawl through him and Sam wants to peel off his skin just to get them out.
He gets his tattoo touched up when Junior gets his. Sam’s been debating with himself how soon he should make Junior get it since the moment the doctor laid the tiny, wailing bundle in his arms. Sam is pretty sure the kid would have gotten a tattoo at ten, the little reckless maniac (he takes after his namesake so much sometimes that Sam aches), but he talks himself into waiting until Junior’s sixteenth birthday before surprising him with a permission slip. Junior is predictably thrilled, and Sam has to convince him that a neck tattoo is a monstrously bad idea.
He feels the itching again when the cancer comes back for the third time. Sam’s known it was just a matter of time, but he can’t stop scratching at his stomach. Junior stops him whenever he catches Sam doing it, and Sam knows logically that he can’t scratch the cancer out, but he can’t quite shake the feeling that it’s just creeping-crawling through his blood like microscopic spiders spreading their venom. If he could just get to them, let them pour out of him like he’s a broken open web sac, maybe he could finally be clean.
Be healthy. Survive again, this time for a different Dean.
He tells Junior this, one sleepless night when thin, wispy cobwebs keep floating across his skin, when the itching won’t stop, and Junior’s holding Sam’s hands down, sobbing at Sam in frustration to, “Stop it, Dad, stop!” and Sam realizes that his own hands are bloody (again). Sam turns his face to his perfect, precious son and tells him that he’s going to survive for him. Junior shakes his head, “Don’t promise that, Dad,” and lets go of Sam’s hands and crumples into the chair beside the bed.
On the day that Sam dies, Sam can see them, the little bodies right under his skin, pebbling it like gooseflesh. Like he’s cold. He tries to ignore them, knows it’s just a matter of time before they finally devour him for good, knows it bothers Junior when he talks about them. He turns his attention to his son instead. He focuses on letting Junior know how much he loves him, how much Sam’s going to miss him, how he’s going to regret not getting to see the old man his boy becomes. He doesn’t pay any attention to the spiders eating him alive.
The itching will stop eventually.