The idea that Lucifer was able to tell that he was getting darker unnerved Dean slightly. If he was honest with himself, he wasn’t actually surprised, though - why shouldn’t Satan himself know when there was something dark and wrong inside a person? It was a little more surprising, though, that Lucifer had singled him out - had been able to sense him enough to pick him out of a crowd in Lawrence, and come visit him in his dreams to harass him about it.
About his dreams of Hell, no less.
>"All that power and you still can't shut these memories from your mind."
Dean watched as Lucifer examined the blades laid out for him - he wondered, absently, what it meant that Lucifer went for the most dangerous, yet the one that required the least skill to deal out damage. The equivalent of a bomb, in the world of knives; one step away from a chainsaw, tearing away flesh messily. Dean’s own blade was thin, small, but he knew how to use it, to make the most of the razor-sharp metal. It was probably unwise to be analyzing the Devil, dangerous to make assumptions based on little details like which blades he was drawn to, though - things weren’t always as clear as they seemed to be, especially not in dreams.
>"Do you want to shut them out, Dean?"
And that was a complicated question, wasn’t it? Because ordinarily, yes - he wanted to have them gone more than almost anything. In retrospect, maybe he should have used his wish on that. But right now, with this darkness in him magnified, these parts of the dreams - the parts where he had the power, the parts where he was the one in control - were appealing. He enjoyed them, and he didn’t even feel sick about it when he woke up in the mornings, anymore.
“Depends on the day,” he answered eventually. Truthfully, because he didn’t feel like dealing with a condiscending Satan in his face telling him he was lying, prying at him and breaking through to his secrets. Better to let the little things out, distract from everything else that was there yet to be discovered.
>"Because I think, especially lately, that you wish you could get away with doing this sort of thing more. Correct me if I'm wrong: are you not tempted?"
“Of course I am,” was probably not an appropriate response to a question like that, most of the time. To Lucifer, though, it felt ...oddly fitting, to admit that sometimes, all he wanted was warm blood on his hands, working his magic with cold steel and listening to the song he was creating with their screams.
It was a stronger temptation, now - normally, he only felt that way when he woke up from a dream of Hell, ghostly pain from what he remembered happening to him turning to anger that made him want to lash out and hurt someone else, get some kind of payback, make them all pay for what had happened to him.
Those were the nights he would drink himself back to sleep, the reason he kept a bottle or a flask in easy reach, and the reason he'd stopped sleeping with a knife under his pillow. He couldn't trust himself with it, not anymore, not when the first thing he thought on waking was of finding someone to use it on.
Now, though.... now, it was all the time, a dull little buzz at the back of his mind that had nothing to do with the Force and everything to do with the monster he was slowly realizing he had become.
"What does that have to do with anything, though?" Defiant tone, smirk on his face, Dean didn't look like a man staring down the Devil, maybe didn't feel like one, either. Lucifer wouldn't hurt him, he was sure - surely Michael would be keeping an eye on his favorite vessel, right? Besides, it was just a dream. As real as they got, sometimes, he knew there would be no permanent damage. Probably.