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Chapter Text

“Okay, but...why not?”

“Because I don’t want to. Why are you on the floor?”

“Well, why are you not on the floor? And come on, it’s not like there’s anything better to do!”

Michael stands above him, leaning over him, eyes narrowed in thinly veiled annoyance as Adam stares up at him from where he’s laid out on the ground, legs crossed with his hands folded under his head. The standoff between them lasts about fifteen seconds before Michael finally speaks again.

“Why would I be on the floor?”

Adam rolls his eyes, propelling himself upwards in one fluid motion so that Michael’s not upside down and turning around to face him. “Look, just...explain why you won’t teach me your angel language? Besides the fact that you don’t want to?”

The archangel’s frown deepens. “No.”

Adam throws his hands up in defeat and scoots backwards until his back rests against the wall. “Okay, fine. Can I at least get the name of it?”

Michael stands there, stiff as always. He looks irked, but not intensely so, which means Adam’s in the clear. Michael’s taken to falling entirely silent instead of running back to the real world now that they’d reached an sort of...agreement, between them. Which is good, because, y’know, company, but bad when you’re generally trying to keep an even sort of peace between yourself and an archangel, because there’s absolutely no way to forget the source of your vexation when the source is always around.

Which meant that the silences were often tense and moody, when they did pop up.

“Enochian,” he says, at last. Adam gives a quick mental cheer, because hey —at least he got something!

“Enochian,” Adam repeats, to himself, testing the word out on his tongue. “Nice name.”

Michael pulls a perplexed face at him, something Adam ignores in favor of beginning to silently sound out what he remembered of the patterns from the true voices of the two archangels that used to assault his eardrums on a daily basis. It’s nothing much—just syllables—but it’s something to focus on, which is always nice.

And then it’s not just syllables, because something in his brain clicks like it did when he called Michael out on his lying bullshit, ages ago, and the syllables start...making sense. Sort of.

“Am I...speaking...co...herent..ly?” Oh. Well, that was a little off. What he had meant to say was Am I making any sense? but...maybe that didn’t translate right? The only experience he’d ever had with learning languages was high school Spanish. No, wait, high school French.

...One of the two.

Human memory was so annoying.

...The fact that he’d just referred to it as human memory instead of his memory was enough to make some alarm bell start ringing in the back of his mind, but he was thankfully distracted from it by Michael, who took a step towards him in surprise.

“You—?!” The naked bewilderment on his face is enough to make a little laugh bubble up in Adam’s throat, and he realizes with a jolt that it’s the first he’s really laughed since before he was eaten alive.

“I’m a quick study?” he tries, when Michael says nothing more. As if shaken from a great daze, Michael comes to, frowning quizzically.

Finally, he replies. “You’re bastardizing it,” he says, gruffly, like he’s trying to cover for the fact that he was taken off-guard. “You speak like a human.”

“Gee, I wonder why,” Adam deadpans. Michael looks vaguely irritated for all of two seconds at Adam’s tone before his face returns to something more neutral.

“How did you pick up on it?”

“When we first—met, down here, and your grace started taking shots at my mind...I don’t know, something passed over from you to me, I guess. All the shit you and Lucifer were screaming at each other made sense after that.”

“Passed over? Nothing should’ve passed over. You were able to briefly witness the inside of my mind—” his features twist like he’s bitten into something sour, but only for a moment. “—but the majority of it should’ve been incomprehensible to the human mind. You don’t have the mental capacity to withstand my power.”

“Well, I didn’t withstand your power, or whatever,” Adam says, leaning his head back against the wall. “But that doesn’t mean that I didn’t understand what I could deal with. It just..made sense. I don’t know what else to tell you, dude.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Alright, alright,” he holds his hands up in a placating manner before pushing himself up off the ground, choosing instead to lean up against the wall. “Y’know, if you really didn’t want me to, uh, bastardize Enochian? You could always teach me how not to.”

Michael makes an aborted gesture with his hands, then, something reminiscent of how Adam had thrown his hands up in the minutes prior before returning them to remain stiffly at his side. He was always stiff. Even when he walked, he had a way of seeming both arrogantly relaxed and unyieldingly rigid at the same time. Adam thinks that it’s because of the stick lodged firmly up his ass, but he digresses.

“If I teach you the basics,” Michael grinds out, thoroughly irritated. “Will you shut up about it?”

Adam raises his eyebrows at him, another smile creeping its way onto his face. “Scout’s honor.”

Despite Michael’s grumpiness about the whole situation, he’s surprisingly good at explaining things. It doesn’t take as long as Adam thought to begin actually sounding less like a human speaking it and more like—well, an angel speaking it. It’s odd, the way that the syllables fall from his tongue, as if the language itself knows he's something that's not supposed to be speaking it. But it’s not as odd as he thought it’d be, and he doesn’t know how to take that; whether he should be a little scared of the change of whether he should suck it up and deal with it.

He doesn’t mention it to Michael, though, because why would he? It isn’t like Michael cares.

Speaking of Michael, he’d finally managed to persuade the archangel to stop standing around like a mannequin and sit down for the first time in ages, ever since he’d been sprawled out on that bed. They always sit across the room from each other—Adam on the couch and Michael on a chair, or vice versa—but it makes Michael seem a little less like a pompous archangel and more like a pompous person, which helps to quell what little aggravation Adam sometimes feels when he talks to him. It was funny to see him lower himself into a chair for the first time, though—stiff and awkwardly, like he had no idea what he was doing.

And he probably hadn’t.

But he seems like he’s losing some of that detachment in his eyes, sometimes. Adam can’t always tell—because, as it turns out, he’s not as good at reading archangel body language as he is at reading archangel true form body language—but he seems calmer, somehow, less exasperated and more forbearing as time goes on and he explains more and more concepts of Enochian to Adam.

He’s still largely indifferent to Adam as a person—Adam is only human, after all, and what’s a human to something as big as an archangel?—but he’s less obvious about it.

Most of the time.

And for a while, things are going...okay. Not well, there is no well in Hell, but it’s significantly less bad than it was before.

But nothing can go okay forever, and he knows this by now. Which is why he’s disappointed, but not surprised, when his hallucinations go from bearable to insufferable.

Adam’s attempting to relay a simple idea to Michael entirely in Enochian without stumbling over any of the words when his vision tunnels, making him gasp and choke on his words as the world around him shifts and tilts. There’s nothing in front of him—nothing he can see—but it’s all he can do to brace himself to keep from falling backwards when he feels a pair of unnaturally strong, cold hands dig into his flesh; it makes him yelp, scrabbling backwards as much as he can and wrapping his arms around his stomach like a shitty makeshift shield. His eyes squeeze shut, desperate for some illusion of safety, but there comes none.

Fuck, fuck, fuck, he is not reliving this. He is not fucking reliving getting eaten alive.

Except he is.

“You’re not real, you’re not real, you’re not real…” he hears himself muttering, but it’s like the insanity has come full circle to take a crack at him once more—there’s hysteria rushing through his blood, his mind, his soul, and all he can think is How do you know? How do you know this isn’t real? You’re still there, you know. You’re there in the darkness. You’re there and no one’s coming to save you. No one. No one. No one.

Fingernails scratch at his legs, his stomach, his arms, tearing past his skin until they reach his bone, and the scrape of nails on it makes him clench his teeth and groan, curling tighter and tighter into a ball until—

Two fingers, pressing warm against his temple.

Adam sucks in a sharp breath as the ghostly fingers attacking him seem to vanish, dissipating as if they were never there at all. He’s been gripping his arms to the point of pain, he realizes, but he can’t bring himself to undo his fingers, tension keeping him wired and cautious. When he finally peels his eyes open and tentatively looks up, his tunnel vision is gone—instead, there’s a pair of nonplussed blue eyes staring into his own, and the fingers slowly remove themselves from Adam’s temple, falling down to hang at the side of their owner. Adam has the odd urge to reach for them, to chase what little he can get of touch down here.

He ignores it, shoves it down, pretends he never had it in the first place.

Instead, he blurts out—”Thank you,” and then, after a beat passes by, “I’m sorry.” And he feels mortification rise up in him, then, enough to make him press his lips together and turn his head away, unable to meet Michael’s eyes. To his horror, he can feel the beginnings of tears starting to prickle at corners of his eyes, and it instantly makes him freeze, gripping his arms even tighter in an attempt to focus on the pain instead of the welling emotion in his throat. If he’d been in an actual, physical body, he thinks that he would’ve probably left bruises by now—the deep, dark kind, the ones that ached even when you only brushed the fabric of your clothes against them. As it is, it just hurts. A lot. And, thankfully, it’s enough to keep him from crying in front of an archangel.

When Adam finally feels somewhat stable enough to look back up, Michael’s still staring down at him. He’s—if Adam didn’t know better, he would say that Michael looked concerned, almost. Not a lot, but...there was something there.

But he does know better, and Michael doesn’t care. He probably just helped because—well, who else is going to keep him company down here? And Adam can understand that. Makes himself understand that, because the alternative is giving himself hope that he isn’t just another person to be discarded by someone else, and hope is dangerous. All it does, all it will ever do, is let him down.

There’s only so much he can take before his mind snaps again—completely and entirely, even worse than the previous time—and there will be no going back once it does that. He thinks that that much hope would be enough to push him over the edge, and to even consider the thought of allowing it to flood through his system once more...

It scares him.

Out of nowhere, Michael gives a short, sharp nod, turning on his heel and walking back over to his side of the room.

Adam twitches his hands, slowly extricating them from their iron grip on his upper arms, trying to ignore the slight tremble to them. If he were in his body, he’s sure that he would be breathless and pale, his heart thudding wildly in his chest.

As it is, he just feels drained.

Drained and embarrassed and desperately in need of one of his mother’s hugs, like when he was little and he’d fallen backwards after his friend’s skateboard slipped out from under him, crying in the way that only a child can. She'd wrapped him up in her arms and kissed his cheek and reassured him that he was okay, and he had believed her because she was his mom and his mom was never wrong, and that had been that.

But those times were long gone, and so was she.

Adam clings onto the memories like a lifeline, shutting his eyes again as he strives to remember every little moment he can with her, even with his fading memory—the way she’d smile at him when he brought home a perfect report card, the way she’d tuck a strand of hair behind her left—no, her right—ear before doing anything, the way she would always tell him how proud she was of him, even when he screwed up a test at school.

He wants to cry again, but he doesn’t. Instead, he starts humming—he’s not sure what song it is, or even if it’s a song at all, but if it was, he thinks it’s something his mother would’ve liked.

Michael says nothing.

“What would you be doing if we weren’t in here?”

“Ruling Heaven,” Michael says, simply.

Adam frowns, considering him for a moment. “Is that it?”

“Well, yes. It’s my duty.”

“But what do you do for fun? Or—wait,” he snorts, “do you even know what fun is?”

Mild annoyance seems to be a constant on Michael’s face, at this point. Mild annoyance and detached confusion. “I am a soldier. I have no time for such things.”

“Had no time for such things,” Adam corrects. “But, you’re down here, now. We’ve got nothing but time for...forever.”

The archangel narrows his eyes. “What’re you implying?”

“I’m not implying anything, I’m just saying. If you ever did anything for fun that could...also be done down here, you might as well do it. It’s not like you have anything better to do. Might even get you to relax, a little”

At the word relax, Michael pulls a face like he’s just said something stupid. It makes Adam raise his eyebrows in question.

“You’re trying to tell me,” Michael says, dryly, “to relax. In here.”

“You know what? Yeah, yeah, I am. Because, I mean, look at you—” he gestures to him, a bit tersely.

“You constantly look like you’re going to be attacked, twenty-four seven. You’re as stiff as a goddamn board, Michael. I’m no expert on anything with, uh, wings, but there’s just no way that that’s good for anyone. Like, I get that Lucifer’s down here too and he might start getting snappy again, but for fuck’s sake, just...just chill out a little? Maybe?”

Adam rubs a hand over his face, unable to believe that he’s trying to urge an archangel to loosen up, of all things. “Or don’t, I don’t know. I can’t make you.”

The archangel’s face turns bemused, entirely puzzled. Adam distantly wonders when he stopped thinking of it as his face and started thinking of it as Michael’s face—they just wore it too differently to be considered the same, he supposed.

“You…” Michael starts, after a moment, and the incomprehension in his tone is enough to make Adam’s attention snap back to him. “You want me to relax...because you think it’ll be good for me?” For a second, Michael seems to glance at him in a way that’s almost pitying—like Adam is the most ignorant schmuck this side of Hell—and Adam suddenly remembers what he’d once thought, about how having the feeling of care thrown back in his face was better than feeling nothing at all.

Here we go, his mind grumbles.

And then Michael’s face twists in even more confusion, and his head tilts to the side, and he scoffs out a, “You’re concerned.”

“Yep,” Adam sighs, feeling the exasperation fall away in the face of his prostration.

“For me.”

“Seems that way.”

Michael chuckles, but it’s deriding, and his eyes are turning sharp, all-consuming.

“I could snap you into pieces,” he spits out, a quiet rancor lacing his tone. “I have no need of your pity.” There is a sudden aura of power surrounding him, burning through the nonexistent air like it’s the fuel for a wildfire, and Adam—he pauses, takes a breath, and catches Michael’s eye, holding his gaze and trying, as hard as he can, to come across as entirely neutral.

They’ve been here before. Adam doesn’t want to make the same mistakes.

“I know,” Adam says, and he says it as matter-of-factly as he would the sky is blue. Michael is not his friend. They stick together begrudgingly, out of loneliness, no matter how either of them act.

That’s all there is to it.

“And, by the way, it’s not pity. It’s the fact that we’re in here with no chance of ever getting out—and, like you said, we only have each other. And sure, whatever, maybe you don’t care about me. Fine. I’m used to it, man, and not just from you,” he pauses, trying to keep his voice even, leaning his elbows on his legs and clasping his hands tightly together between his knees.

There’s a slight tremor of fear that stirs awake in the back of his chest that he rushes to bury. He can’t afford fear. He can’t.

The eye contact between them is held, and it’s like the fervor behind Michael’s scrutinizing look has increased tenfold, a hundredfold. It’s less like he’s being looked at and more like he’s being looked through. He keeps himself as unyielding as he can, anyway, refuses to break under the weight of the power that suffocates the room. It almost feels like Adam’s decided to stand directly over a blaze of hot flames and breathe in, the heat making its way all the way down into his lungs and settling there.

He’s not going to break. He won’t.

“But I’m not you. I’m not like you. Obviously.”

I’m only human, you asshole, is what he actually he wants to snipe, but it’s pointless. Michael’s made it well-known how he feels about humans, how he feels about humanity. Verbalizing that sort of thing at him would only serve to make him more condescending, more imperious.

There’s no point to this.

“What were you—” Adam stops and bites down on his words as his voice starts to raise itself without his permission, letting out a huff. He smiles, but it’s hollow, and when he speaks again it's so quiet that he'd doubt Michael would be able to hear him if he wasn't an archangel. “Were you expecting something different?”

He doesn’t wait for Michael to respond, instead getting up and walking away until he reaches his room, shutting the door behind him in a way that's not quite slamming but damn close. It’s a foolish gesture—Michael can just do his whole mental teleportation thing and appear in front of him—but he thinks he’s earned the right to act like the teenager he is, by this point.

Michael doesn’t follow him, anyway.

Eventually, there’s a knock on his door.

Adam, who had been resting on his bed for only a short amount of time—well, no, it had been a while, but when put in comparison to how long he was used to being alone...yeah, he supposed it’d been pretty short—raised his head a little, looking in the direction of the door with no small amount of suspicion.

Michael did not knock. He just appeared, wherever he wanted and whenever he wanted. Adam had been almost expecting him to materialize in his bedroom any day now, as surly and snobby as he'd always been. But when Adam swings his legs off the bed and makes his way to the door, lo and behold—there stands one slightly awkward-looking archangel who now looks like he’s attempting to hide his discomfort under the guise of arrogance.

It’d be funny if Adam wasn’t so floored by the whole thing.

“You know how to knock?” Adam says, eyeing Michael with a sense of amused astonishment that he pulled out of his ass in an attempt to cover his own surprise. Michael, to his credit, does not outwardly react.

“I looked through your memories,” he replies, and Adam may be used to sharing a body with someone who has no concept of privacy, but...the thought of his mind being invaded still makes his face twist in discomfort before he smooths it out and nods.

“Right. Yeah.”

They stand in silence for a few moments, staring uncomfortably at each other, and Adam’s about to make a shitty joke that Michael wouldn’t understand about the weather when Michael says, “What would you be doing, if...we weren’t in here?”

Adam blinks, taking a moment of two to properly register the realization of what this is—an olive branch. Or the closest thing to one that he’s going to get from someone as prideful as Michael. It’s more than he ever expected, honestly, and it makes his brain malfunction for all of two seconds before he leans against the door frame, crossing his arms and studying the being standing in front of him with a careful, cautious eye.

He’s not going to be an asshole about it, he decides—they’d had enough of that so far, and Michael, as much of a douchebag as he could be sometimes, already had to monitor Lucifer on a constant basis. He wasn’t kidding when he said that the dude could stand to relax every once in a while.

“I don’t know how much time’s passed, up there,” Adam begins, finally, “but maybe I still would’ve been in college. I don’t...remember much of it, anymore,” he chuckles, a bit, lowering his eyes to stare at Michael’s shoulder instead of his face, “so, I can’t say for sure. Maybe I’d be in med school by now? I wanted to be a doctor. To help people, I think. Like my mom did.”

And then he shakes his head and offers the archangel a rueful little smile. “Anyways, I’d probably just be living life like every other human, y’know? Doing taxes and going out with friends and stuff.”

Michael’s face seems to shift, then—from uncomfortable and mock-haughty to something a little more hesitant, a little more...curious. It’s a stark contrast from the last time Adam had seen him. He’s not sure what to think about it—but, then again, is he ever sure about anything when it comes to Michael?

“And what did you do for...fun?” The word fun sounds forced on his tongue, like he thinks the concept is ridiculous but he's forcing it out regardless. It's almost enough to make Adam want to laugh—almost being the key word.

“Well,” Adam pauses, pondering, “I remember...I used to play board games and card games with my mom. The rules and pieces and stuff are a little fuzzy, but I could probably put together a really bad copy of one or two.”

Michael nods once, drawing himself up straighter like he’s issuing commands to an army, arms crossed defensively in front of him. “Show me.”

Adam cocks an eyebrow at him, letting out a snort at the archangel’s clipped tone. “Are you asking me or are you ordering your lackeys?” Before Michael can answer, Adam pushes off the door frame and turns around to step back into the room, not looking back to see if he’s going to follow or not. “Yeah, sure, whatever. I’ll cook something up.”

Michael is, for the most part, uninterested in games.

This doesn’t surprise him. What surprises him is the fact that he’s willingly going along with it. He’s still a bit aloof, still a bit distant, still extremely stuck-up, but he’s not...unkind. It’s incredibly perturbing to Adam after so long of being lorded over. He was no doormat, but he’d certainly grown used to putting up with enough shit to make him feel like one—and that was to be expected, wasn’t it? When dealing with a snobby prince? The snobby prince, more like—he was Heaven’s ruler.

Or, well, he used to be.

...It was nice to be talked to, nowadays. Even if Michael still sort of acted like Adam’s brain was too small to process anything outside of the mundane.

He didn’t let himself grow used to it, though; the whole everything’s going all right schtick. He knew better than that.

They’re both seated on opposite sides of the bed, playing a little card game that Adam had whipped up in an instant after years and years without any sort of creative outlet. Originally, he’d tried to put designs on the cards—like he’d remembered the ones on Earth had—but the designs always seemed off, never quite right but never quite wrong, either, and eventually Adam had just given in to his annoyance and slapped some simple numbers down onto them.

The good thing about playing games is that they help to pass the time. The bad thing about games is that Adam’s never won a single one of them because Michael’s mind is a strategic powerhouse and he keeps kicking his ass every time they play.

“Damn it!” Adam grouses, throwing the remainder of his cards by is feet in front of him on the bed as Michael lays down another winning card on the pile in front of them.

“I’m not sure why you insist on playing this game in particular, considering you lose every time,” Michael comments, studying Adam with an idle sort of curiosity that makes him feel just a little bit like a high school science project. “Why persist?”

Adam sends him a flat look, scooping the cards from the bed up in his hands and beginning to reshuffle them. “Maybe because we have nothing better to do? And anyway, this game is more fun. I always lost to everyone I ever played against in board games, but cards? I could always do cards.”

“You’re still losing, though. You can’t win.”

“Well, who’s saying that?”

Michael blinks. “Me. I was created for warfare, Adam,” he says, like he’s explaining it to a child, and Adam rolls his eyes. “You won’t be able to win.”

“We shall see,” Adam says, lightly, in Enochian, raising his eyebrows before dealing out another two hands and placing the rest of the deck on the soft surface next to him. It’s the way that the cards don’t dip and slide into the crevices of the bed that remind him that all of this is just a series of images conjured up by him and his soul, but he brushes the existential crisis aside in favor of the game.

Michael wins. Again and again and again. Adam is honestly surprised that he hasn’t at least requested a different game, if not to stop entirely, but he’s been quiet, mostly. He still questions why Adam is so persistent when it comes to this singular game, but Adam never answers, not really.

Truth be told, he’s been watching Michael’s moves. Michael automatically reacts whenever Adam lays down a card, laying down his own on top of it like his mind paves out the quickest path to victory the instant he catches sight of Adam’s card. It almost definitely does, knowing him, but his strategies are getting repetitive—he’s growing too confident in his assumption that Adam will never win and doling out some of the same moves, over and over.

They play and play until Michael lays down a card, waiting for Adam’s next move, calm in the way he sits back and waits to win.

“You know,” Adam says, a smile beginning to grow on his face, and it makes Michael quirk a questioning eyebrow his way. “You should know better than to underestimate humans, by now. After all,” he lays down a winning card on top, “one of them did drag you down here. And another of them just beat you at a card game.”

Michael’s face shifts from looking calm and confident to looking genuinely, honest-to-God stunned, and it makes Adam fist pump and laugh in surprised delight. The archangel stares down at the winning card like he can’t believe it’s real, and then gazes at Adam’s grin like he’s just been tackled and he’s picking himself up off the grass.

He doesn’t say anything, but Adam swears he sees some sort of shift dance its way across his face—something that looks at him instead of through him—and it makes something akin to triumph flare in his stomach before he quickly shushes it, beats it back down so that Michael doesn’t feel it.

What the triumph is there for, he’s not sure.

It almost makes him think that he’s won something more than a card game.