Chapter Text
He doesn’t know how long it’s been.
He doesn’t sing, anymore. Can’t find it in himself to. It’s like all the despair that he’d been fighting for so long had finally made a permanent home in his heart and mind, dragging him down, down, down until he was numb, number than he’s ever been before. He doesn’t wish for death, anymore.
He doesn’t wish for anything.
Adam just...sits. It’s cold in here, too, and he lives under the assumption that it’s simply a reflection of what his body’s feeling out in the real world. The cold settles around his soul, harsh and biting and all-consuming, and he doesn’t remember what warmth feels like—if he’d ever actually felt it at all. All he knows is the gelid rawness of this place; this world.
Did this even count as a place? A world?
He’s still in his weird not-body. It gives him a sense of something, at least. A reminder of what it was like to exist, when life had been life and not something damning, something that brought him nothing but misery when he was vaguely sure of the fact that it...wasn’t supposed to do that? The word life didn’t even have any meaning anymore, not really. It was just a concept, something saved for those who walked the Earth, who weren’t locked away and rotting within their own minds. And he wasn’t angry, not anymore, because anger took energy and he didn’t have any of that.
All he has is himself, consistently curling into a metaphorical ball and shutting his metaphorical eyes, all so he didn’t have to look at his metaphorical body. It gave him sense, but it brought him no joy.
He probably looks pathetic.
He doesn’t care.
He sees people, sometimes. Flashes behind his eyes of people who he once knew, years and years and years ago. Sometimes, it’s his mother standing before him—and she is still beautiful, even if his mind conjures up different versions of her every time. She has a full head of blonde hair that matches his own, sometimes. Other times, it’s streaked with gray, and the lines around her eyes when she looks at him and worn and sad. He wonders if he looks similar.
“Adam,” she says, and that’s when he’ll know that she isn’t talking to him. Not really. “You have to get up. You can’t spend all day in bed!” Her eyes are warm and blank, cheerful and hollow, speaking to an Adam from a different world.
And then she’ll shift, and she isn’t Kate, anymore. Instead, she’s now a he, and he is his friend Evan from college, and Evan laughs, and he isn’t real. And Adam can barely even remember what he looks like—was his hair dark or light? Were his facial features amiable or mischievous? Had he been stocky or slim? He looks different every time, and Adam can’t stand it.
“Dude, can you believe how old Professor Daniels is? I swear to God, it’s like he climbed out of a fuckin’ grave, man. Why is he even working here?”
The voices don’t reverberate. It’s like they’re there, but they aren’t. He hears them, but he doesn’t.
A lifetime ago, the deeply-buried science nerd he’d once been would’ve jumped at the opportunity to explore such a topic. Now, he does nothing.
Another shift, and it’s Sam, now, standing in front of him—except it’s the Sam from when he was in the Cage and there are long marks tattered over his skin, torn and bleeding, chains protruding from his stomach and going into nowhere.
“We’re blood,” he whispers, and Adam doesn’t respond. If he looks up, meets Sam’s scarred face, he knows that his eyes will be just as false; just as empty.
He keeps his eyes shut. Shift. Shift. Shift. More people. More memories. More lies.
The worst shift is when the person changes into Michael, staring down at him with an unyielding, fierce coldness, because then Adam can’t tell what’s real and what isn’t. Michael’s the only one who can visit him, down here, and that changes everything. Had he dropped in since that last time? Had Adam just been hallucinating him this entire time? Were all those encounters with him even real? Adam couldn’t even sense his grace, anymore. Or maybe he could, and he’d just forgotten the feeling of it.
God, what had it felt like? What was it like to feel?
Michael never spoke, either, which never helped him out with his predicament. How was he supposed to figure out if he was real or not if Michael didn’t speak?
...Is Adam real?
No. No, that was stupid. Of course he was real. Of course. He has to be.
He has to be.
Michael appears again.
Adam is just as still and as silent as he’s ever been, for however long it’s been. He doesn’t move. Barely thinks, anymore. He can’t bring himself to make noise, not with the silence around him so deafeningly loud. It’s all he is, all he has. It’s the only constant remaining, what with his memory of life failing him and the lack of anything else to sense, to see, to do.
Michael appears again, and he is silent. Adam can feel himself being analyzed, stared at, just like usual. If the “usual” was actually a thing that happened, of course. He was still on the fence about it.
“You’re quiet. Why?” Adam hears, and he would’ve sucked in a breath, if he had the energy to. Or, if he could, y’know, breathe. As it is, he minutely raises his head, cracking his eyes open to look at the archangel across from him. Michael doesn’t speak—never, since their last conversation—but he...just did.
This...this is new.
It’s jarring, enough to make something inside of himself crack. It reminds him of surprise—or, well, what surprise used to feel like, if he was reading the emotion right. It was odd. He didn’t know.
Michael keeps staring at him, and Adam stares right back, and they inspect each other like it’s something that they’ve always done. It’s always interesting to see Michael. If not for the mirror image of himself, Adam would have probably forgotten what he looks like by now.
Then, Michael sighs. He sighs and, suddenly, he’s sitting across from Adam on the not-floor, leaning back against a wall that isn’t there.
None of his hallucinations had ever sat down before. Certainly not Michael.
Adam tracks Michael’s movements with more ferocity, now, his mind desperately trying to reject the hope that’s beginning to flood his system. Hope is dangerous, hope is foreign, hope is new. He watches the way that Michael crosses his arms, his eyes beginning to take on a moody, annoyed glare, and—they aren’t hollow. There is no blankness to them, only exasperation.
He starts to laugh.
At least, he thinks he’s laughing—for all he knows, he could be crying—but there’s noise, bubbling out of his fake throat and through his mouth for the first time in God knows how long, and it feels like he’s vibrating, almost. Like everything in his soul is on fire after being shoved underwater for so, so long.
“You’re—real.” He gasps out, at last, and Michael is looking at him in a manner that could almost be described as perturbed, like Adam’s gone completely and irrevocably insane, and maybe he is—he probably is—but he doesn’t care.
He just laughs and laughs and laughs.
Michael doesn’t shift into anything else, after that. He doesn’t leave, either. Adam wants to ask why—he wants something, after so long, it’s fucking amazing—but he remembers how that went, last time, and he keeps his mouth shut about it. Instead, he hesitantly talks; about anything and everything that he can think of; he hopes that maybe, just maybe, if he makes himself interesting enough, Michael will stay.
Sometimes, he quietly describes what little bits of individual memories he remembers of his past life. Michael never answers, like how he never answered before, but it’s the company that counts—the archangel could be silent forever and Adam would be grateful for the simple fact that he was there. It’s a fierce, desperate gratefulness, one that didn’t compare to the grudging appreciation he’d had for him back when he’d been singing all the time.
The hallucinations still appear, but they’re easier to ignore with the knowledge that someone real is there. He doesn’t talk about them, doesn’t tell Michael about them, because some things are just...private. Even if Adam had accidentally been in Michael’s head, once.
One day, though, he decides to risk a question—when something in his mind begins to mock him for the idea that this might all be a hallucination, too. He needs an answer. Any answer.
“So...what’s going on with the whole Lucifer thing?”
Michael meets his eyes briefly, before looking off to the side.
“Ceasefire,” he says, at last.
Adam nods, trying not to slump in relief. “Ah. Right.” A...younger part of him, one that had been recently reawakened, wants to take the chance to snap an Oh, so you finally realized that there’s no point to it? at him, but Adam silences him, brushes him out of his mind. There’s no point in upsetting the peace; not when he’s just getting used to the company again.
“Why?” And there Michael goes, asking him why again, like he cares. Adam knows he doesn’t, knows that him asking is probably just a formality, knows that Michael could split apart his mind any time he wanted and just take the answers to any question he could ever ask—and isn’t that just a lovely guy to have for a roommate? Someone who could rip you apart at any time if he feels like it?
Well, at least he hasn’t. Yet. Though, if Adam’s being honest, he’d take the torture over the solitude any day.
But he shrugs, now. “I don’t know. I knew you guys were fighting, and I knew that you probably wouldn’t have come in here if you had something better to do, so...I guess I just wanted to make sure everything was alright?” He trails off near the end, making it sound more like a question than an answer.
Michael furrows his eyebrows at him, peering at him suspiciously. “Lucifer isn't your problem, he’s mine. Why would you care?”
Adam raises his eyebrows and looks away, threading the fingers of both his hands together as he did so. “Not much else to do down here, right?”
It’s a lame answer, but he hasn’t got anything else. He keeps his eyes trained firmly on the blackness of the not-ground, waiting to see if Michael will answer. Unsurprisingly, he doesn’t, so Adam captures the loose end of a thread of a memory in his mind and starts to ramble on about it. Occasionally, he makes up details as he goes, to fill in the ones that have become entirely lost to him now.
He wonders if that makes it more fact or more fiction.
Adam’s halfway through a story about the time he tried to jump out of a tree with a trash bag to see if it would work like a parachute when he was little when another hallucination appears, standing directly over Michael with an ominous air. There’s chunks of flesh missing from the hallucination’s skin, ragged blonde hair sitting awry on the body’s head like a patchwork scarecrow, and with a dull thrum of alarm, Adam realizes that it’s his mother—how she looked before she died, and he immediately stumbles over his words as he gazes up at her in muted horror, his mouth immediately snapping shut.
She stares down at him with the same vacant look as the rest of his hallucinations, her head tilted at an awkward angle, and Adam is dimly aware of Michael frowning in confusion and turning to look behind himself, and then turning back to Adam when he sees nothing.
“What?”
But Adam doesn’t reply, too busy gawking in fear as Kate opens her mouth to speak, only for blood to dribble out of her mouth like saliva, and that’s when he thinks no, no, that’s enough, and draws his legs up to his chest, tilting his head downwards to shove his eyes into his knees as he presses his lips together. He doesn’t want to look at this—having to see her, knowing he never will again, was bad enough as it was. But having to see her like this, all mangled and broken?
That’s just insult and injury.
He doesn’t know if Michael’s still there or not, whether he’s decided that this is just Adam making a fool of himself or if he’s more confused than he is annoyed. He can’t bring himself to look up to check, either, not with the chance that she could still be there.
He’s shaking, he realizes—and it’s so strange, he thinks, to be shaking in a place where he doesn’t even have a body, just some weird projection of himself that Michael had conjured up, still with the odd disconnectedness that always made it feel like he was wading through filmy water with every movement. But, he is, and he doesn’t appreciate it.
Adam isn’t sure how long he sits like that, curled into an upright ball like he would in the past times of solitude. What he is sure of is the fact that, when he eventually does look up, the hallucination of Kate is gone.
And Michael is still there.
So, what else is Adam supposed to do except carry on like it never happened?
“Uh,” Adam says, somehow managing to pull his lips in the directions that he’s pretty sure a smile is supposed to go in. “Sorry about that. Anyway—”
“And what was that supposed to be?” Michael’s voice cuts him off, paramountcy still lacing his tone like a dull poison, and Adam pauses for a minute before looking the archangel straight in the eyes and letting the smile fall from his face.
“It isn’t your problem,” he parrots, a little slowly, “it’s mine. Why would you care?”
Michael is silent, and Adam resumes his story.
Not much changes, even after that. Adam talks, Michael listens—and sometimes interjects with a “Why?” or a barbed comment, something that Adam is growing too used to deflecting—and that’s that. His hallucinations still pop up, on occasion, but none of them are ever as bad as that one had been, so Adam does a pretty good job of ignoring them. He still stumbles over his words, especially when some of them begin speaking—and he knows Michael notices it each and every time—but he always presses onwards, regardless.
It manages, it works, and that’s how they keep things.
Over time, Adam’s come to understand at least one thing about Michael—for someone who was so keen to pick fights, he didn’t actually seem to like unnecessarily fighting anyone, something that was contradictory in and of itself. When he thought back on when he used to be able to watch Michael and Lucifer fight, it only backed up his theory. Michael had never really made to attack Lucifer until Lucifer struck first, or until Lucifer spat out some great insult that pushed all of Michael’s buttons at once.
He doesn't know why that sticks with him. It's like he's trying to find proof of some concept foreign to him—it's just useless information that digs a hole in the back of his brain and refuses to leave.
Whatever. It wasn't like he would ever mention his observation to Michael out loud, so it wasn't worth dwelling on. He's just not risking Michael pulling another one-eighty and deciding to head back out and leave Adam alone. He may not necessarily like the winged bastard, but it was either him or the frosty silence—and Adam was not going back to that, not if he could help it.
He was getting a little tired of the biting interjections of Michael about how dumb he was (being a human and all), though, but it wasn’t like he had much room to talk—after all, it was exactly how he’d acted at first, too. It would make him a hypocrite to call Michael out on it now.
...But he didn’t exactly want to keep just sitting there and taking it, either.
He figured that passive-aggressiveness was as good a solution as any.
Adam’s in the middle of going on about the time he’d accidentally gotten lost on the first day of classes at college when Michael scoffs and says, “Well, of course something as small-minded as a monkey would get lost in a place where the buildings are labelled.”
And Adam immediately goes quiet, staring impassively at Michael for a few moments before glancing down and starting to play with his hands, tapping absentmindedly at the back of his knuckles. He isn’t sure exactly how long he stays quiet for—it’s not like time can be measured, down here, where there’s no days and no nights—but he stays quiet. And when he eventually looks up, Michael is staring at him with something that vaguely looks like annoyed confusion marring his face.
Adam takes a breath and continues on.
He doesn’t have the fingers in the world to keep track of how many times the same thing happens, but he can pinpoint the moment that Michael’s insults start to slow down, and it’s around the same time that his silences get longer.
It’s horrible, of course, to the both of them—to sit in nothing except darkness, staring at nothing in particular, barely holding on by the simple knowledge that they aren’t alone; but Adam is firm, unyielding, trying to at least put a little distance between the him of now and the near-thoughtless vegetable he’d been, not so long ago.
He had pride, once. Maybe this isn’t like the pride he once had—maybe it’s just a replica, an imitation meant to simulate the real thing—but it’s all he has. So, he implements it.
They never actually talk about it. There’s no conversation that goes between them about the subject, because they’ve been down here for God knows how long and they still barely know each other, which means actual genuine conversation is apparently a no-no.
Well, Adam barely knows Michael, at least. He’s pretty sure he’s talked enough about himself for Michael to get to know him at least a little bit. That is—if Michael actually listens to him.
They don’t speak about it, but, eventually, the comments begin to subside. Adam makes it through seven nonsensical ramblings before he realizes that they’ve stopped entirely. Instead, Michael just...sits there.
There’s only so long that Adam can talk, though, before he eventually runs out of things to talk about. Hence, his current dreadful situation: small talk.
With the archangel Michael.
Yeah, he’s pretty much out of options, at this point. As if he didn't know that already.
“So...what’s Heaven like?”
Michael raises an eyebrow at him. “You’ve been. You know what it’s like.”
Adam nods. “Right, yeah. But is it different for angels?”
“Well, of course.”
Patience. Adam needs to have patience. He gets the feeling that he’s going to be repeating that mantra a lot, if this continues. “Okay. But how?”
Michael looks blank and his voice is monotone—business as usual. “Humans each have their own personalized heaven, where they live through their happiest memories. Angels have the ability to walk outside of these memories—and, enter them undetected, if they wish. We are what keep Heaven standing.”
Adam thinks about that for a moment, and then he snorts. “Undetected? So it’s like...I don’t know, a zoo?”
The archangel frowns, tilting his head a bit to the left. “A zoo?”
“It’s—a place. For, uh, humans to go. It has animals in it, and stuff, and humans can come in and look at them.”
Michael seems to pause, and then, finally, he nods. “I suppose they're similar, then.”
Adam wonders, for a brief moment, if any angel had ever gone poking around his heaven, and resists the urge to pull a face. Instead, he carries on. “Alright. Is that all it is for angels, then? Just wandering around in a bunch of dead people’s memories?”
The archangel’s face quickly morphs into a scowl. “Of course not. Don’t be stupid. There is no way to explain the magnificence of Heaven to a human—it would be far too complex for you to understand.”
Sighing, Adam is about to acquiesce before an idea strikes him. “Well...could you show me? Like, I don’t know, could you...project images of it in my mind or something?”
“Living humans can't perceive Heaven, and they certainly can't perceive it from an angel’s point of view—” Michael immediately begins, flat and rebuking, but he stops, face contorting in a sudden, unexpected pain, the most emotion Adam's ever seen on him—and a second later, Adam finds out why.
There’s a throbbing anguish, suddenly, flaring upwards from the pit of his stomach, and Adam gasps, hands flying down to fist at the space near his abdomen.
“Lucifer,” Michael hisses, making Adam jump at the intensity of it, and his eyes flare a bright, threatening blue before he completely vanishes.
Just like before.
But Adam doesn’t have time to wonder whether or not he’s coming back, though. He doesn’t have time for his mind to seize up in terror at the thought of being alone. The eternal darkness is, suddenly, abruptly shifting and morphing around him while the pain in his body begins to spread, pausing at odd and erratic intervals before speeding up again. It’s like all those years when he was feeling what Michael was feeling, back when he and Lucifer had fought all the time, and suddenly every nerve ending that he shouldn’t have is on fire with white-hot—white-cold?—pain.
Adam screams and screams and screams until there’s nothing left to do except to sink down into the feeling and accept it, finally letting it bolt freely through his limbs faster than anything he’s ever felt before.
He’s so tired. The pain doesn’t feel so bad, if he thinks about it. God, how long had it been since he’d felt this much?
Was he still screaming? He couldn’t tell.
For a second, he thinks he feels something wreathe around him, but then there’s a bright flash of extra-vivid agony and he’s—gone.
He’s floating.
It’s still dark, and he’s still cold, but he isn’t being ripped apart, anymore—instead, it’s like he’s in stasis. Nothing hurts, but there’s no numbness. And he’s not asleep, either.
Adam just is; there’s no other way to describe it.
When he finally comes to, or whatever the closest wording for that is when he’s in a place where sleep and unconsciousness don’t exist, he’s met with...a living room.
His living room, from his house in Windom. At least, he thinks it is—his memory has almost completely gone to shit, at this point, but it isn’t like random people’s living rooms would just be floating around in his brain. It’s his best guess.
The sight doesn’t sit right with him—not after the Cage, not after the darkness he’d suffered in for so long. As he pushes himself up from the couch that he was splayed out on, he looks around, noting the little inconsistencies that pop up here and there—there’s a picture frame on the side table, but no picture in it. It’s just blank. And there’s an old throw pillow that his conceptual head had been resting on, but it’s an almost unnatural shade of white; nothing that would have been present in his and his mother’s home, he’s pretty sure.
He wonders if it’s just his brain trying to fill in details for long-forgotten memories. Probably.
Adam stands up, surprised to find his movements a little more fluid, a little more real. Less dream-like and more...human-like? Or whatever.
But…
“Michael?” he calls out, a little halfheartedly. When there’s no answer, he presses his lips together and curls his hand into a loose fist, rubbing absentmindedly at the side of his index finger with his thumb. A soothing motion, almost.
Fuck. What had happened?
There was pain, he remembers. Pain, and then...nothing. Michael had said something about—about Lucifer, hadn’t he? And then he’d vanished, presumably to go fight him.
So why was Adam here? In a house—well, the memory of one, anyway—instead of in the darkness? For someone who had wished for so long to be anywhere but there, he realizes, he sure was anxious when confronted with something that seemed remotely peaceful.
But, he couldn’t stand here forever. He could, actually, but that would be ridiculously boring and there was finally something down here in this nightmare of a Cage that looked material enough to explore and was accessible to him, so like hell was he just going to stand around and look pretty.
As he wanders, more and more inconsistencies pop out at him—a transparent outline of a chair, like it’s not sure whether or not it’s supposed to be there; more blank pictures frames, a jacket or two hovering in midair, thrown over something that was once there but apparently can’t be remembered now. Could be a chair, or a footstool, or a table. Who knows, at this point? Certainly not Adam.
He finally makes it to a door, stopping in front of it in a way that makes him think it was muscle memory, at one point, and with a jolt he realizes that this was his room, all those years ago. This was where he grew up; where he spent all those lonely nights when his mother was gone. Adam reaches for the doorknob, hesitating only for a moment before twisting it and throwing the door open, and what he sees makes him come to an abrupt, screeching halt.
It’s...Michael. But Michael is laid out on the floor, seemingly dead to the world. His eyes are closed but his eyebrows are drawn together, and Adam genuinely can’t tell if he’s “awake” or if he’s in the same weird stasis that Adam had originally found himself in.
“Michael?” he questions, softly, creeping forward like he’s trying not to startle a scared animal. There’s no response. Michael just lays there, entirely still, and it scares Adam to death because if Michael’s not... awake, for lack of a better term, then what’s standing between the two of them and Lucifer?
Nothing makes sense. None of this makes sense. Where did the house come from? Why is Michael suddenly fucking incapacitated?
And...his form, his body—it’s flickering, almost, fading and out of transparency like the outline of the chairs in the dining room. It raises several alarm bells in him, alarm bells that he didn’t think existed, and it almost makes him wonder if Michael’s even tangible. But...if he wasn’t tangible, he’d fall through the floor, wouldn’t he? Or...does it not count, since this floor doesn’t exist?
Adam has a lot of questions, zero answers, and a whole lot of sudden exhaustion, so he reaches out and grabs Michael, trying to ignore the fact that this is the first time he’s felt another physical form since Dean had lifted him up in that room on Earth. When Michael doesn’t even react to the touch, he sighs and works to lift him up, maneuvering him and his dead weight until he can shove him over and up onto the bed.
Michael lands in an uncomfortable-looking position, rolled onto his stomach with his arms pressed under him. Adam gives him a quick once-over, decides he’s done enough, and hurriedly makes his exit.