Chapter Text
“What’s wrong?”
Adam’s fiddling with the knobs on the sink, thinking about how odd it is to work a sink with no water, and Michael is sitting at the dining room table, eyes downcast. He glances at Michael, who doesn’t respond.
“I might not be able to fix it, but it’s just me in here. It’s not like I’m gonna tell anyone. I mean, you don’t have to, but, y’know,” he pauses, turning around. “I’m here.”
Michael has always had times where he goes quiet. Normally, Adam would just chatter on until he decides to reintegrate himself into the conversation, but..that was their old normal.
What’s normal down here has shifted, somewhat, ever since Michael’s apology. They’re a little more open, a little less...rough around the edges, with each other. Adam doesn’t know why —he’s still not even sure that the apology was real and not something his broken little mind cooked up—but they just...are.
He’s not complaining, he just—doesn’t fully understand. Then again, he doesn’t understand a lot of things, so it might be best to just roll with it. Like pretty much everything else, down here.
Adam leans against the kitchen counter and watches and waits, unsure about whether or not Michael even heard him speak. There’s only ever been a few times that Michael’s confided in him, and they were brief; when he’d seemed a little to the left of unsteady. He doesn’t look unsteady now, though—he just looks despondent. Mournful. Lost enough in his own thoughts that he’s showing emotion without realizing it, probably.
For once, he finds himself not jumping in surprise when Michael speaks out of the blue. “My brother—Raphael. He should be ruling over Heaven, now that I’m gone.”
“Are you worried for him?”
Michael shakes his head. “No. I haven’t worried about my brothers in...a very long time. I…” he sighs, pausing, and he looks old again. “The relationship between my brother and I was—strained, at best, but...I thought we had some loyalty to each other. I didn’t realize that he’d…”
“Leave you in Hell?” Adam sounds a little douche-y, he knows, but he doesn’t mean it unkindly. It’s just a fact. When Michael looks up at him, Adam offers a mirthless smile. Michael peers at him for a moment, like he isn’t sure if Adam’s being intentionally barbed on purpose, but whatever conclusion he comes to makes him relax once more.
“Yes.”
“Yeah. I get it. Maybe not on the same level as you,” Adam says, when Michael frowns at him, “but I do. Sam and Dean...I didn’t know them for very long, but they seemed like they weren’t kidding when they—when they called me their family. And I was starting to believe them, y’know? Especially when they came for me, back in that room. I thought…” The memory of the way he’d begged Dean to help flickers through his mind, unwanted, and Adam tries his best to forget it. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter. Look where we are now, right?”
Michael makes a noise that almost sounds like a snort, and it makes Adam’s eyes widen, the entirety of his attention immediately focusing on the archangel in front of him. “I suppose.”
Adam’s brain, the nuisance it is, has suddenly come up with something new to do. A goal. A mission, if you will: Make Michael Laugh.
If nothing else, it should help make a good portion of eternity pass by more quickly, right?
For now, though, he walks over and takes a seat at the opposite side of the table, folding his hands together on the tabletop. “I’m sorry your brother didn’t come for you.”
Adam hopes it doesn’t come off as pitying. That’s not how he means to sound. But Michael doesn’t seem to take it that way, instead glancing down to where Adam’s hands lay.
“Yeah, kid," he says, sighing. "Me too.”
A beat passes, and then, “Kid? I’m a kid, now?”
“Well, you’re very young.”
“What does that make you? An old man?”
The corner of Michael’s mouth twitches upwards into a smirk, but it’s not cold or cruel like all the smirks he’d ever given before. Instead, it’s a little sharp, a little...if Adam didn’t know better, he would say playful.
Whatever it is, Adam finds that he isn’t afraid of it.
“I am the Prince of Heaven. I have led countless angels into battle and emerged victorious. I am the Viceroy of Heaven, my Father’s right hand.”
“Maybe,” Adam says, leaning back in his chair, “but you’re still old, right? So, I’m not wrong.”
Michael tilts his head back, eyeing him with amusement flickering briefly in his eyes, and Adam sends him back the biggest, cheekiest grin he’s got.
A pro of regaining some of his previously-lost memories is that a lot of the inconsistencies around the house have disappeared. A few of the pictures in the picture frames have come back, the ones of him and his mother. There’s a singular photo of John that returns, too. Adam picks it up and watches it burn under his fingers the minute he notices it, the false impression of smoke leaving no smell behind. Maybe it was a little unnecessary, he’ll admit, but he’s in Hell because he had the misfortune of being related to the man and he’ll take whatever small pleasures he can get.
A con, on the other hand, is that he misses his mom more than ever.
It was easier to suppress his grief when she was just another of his hallucinations—when he knew that he loved her, but actually feeling that love had been something rare, as distant as his memories had been. But now? Now that he could remember her and her favorite jacket and the smell of the flowery shampoo that she’d always used?
It made Adam ache, the kind of ache that unraveled the entirety of his thought process and made him want to dive headfirst into the first metaphorical pit he could find just to try and escape it.
Nowadays, everywhere he looked in the house, all he could see was her —sometimes literally. He saw her sitting at the table, doing paperwork. He saw her laughing at the TV. He saw her opening and closing the door to her room, humming quietly under her breath as she walked.
It was all he could do to remind himself that the stabbing pain in his heart was better than nothing at all. That he could be so, so much worse off.
Michael notices, Adam can tell; can feel the inquisitive eyes that burn holes into the back of his head whenever he can’t bring himself to look away from her; when his gaze lingers on something that isn’t there for much, much too long. He almost wants to tell him about it. Almost. Michael had sent away the hallucinations before, after all—he could do it again. But Adam holds his tongue, keeps his silence, and he doesn’t want to admit to the fact that it’s because he doesn’t think he could bear it if Michael began his jeering again. Not over something like this.
His mom had already been used against him once, on Earth. He doesn’t know how he’d react if the same thing happened down here. So what if they’d started to get along better? Adam couldn’t predict an archangel, didn’t have any sort of goddamn guidebook that explained to him when they acted nice and when they were about to sink their claws into his weaknesses and tear him apart from the inside out.
He’s smart enough to realize that he probably isn’t thinking straight. He’s lost enough to not know how to follow any other train of thought.
Michael says, “You’re upset,” and Adam looks away.
“I miss my mom,” he replies, softly, and he swallows down the lump in his throat as best as he can, trying to pretend like he can’t feel the ghostly memory of her hand holding his when he was little, crossing the street with him or leading him through a store. The last time he’d felt any sort of physical contact with anyone had been when he’d tried to move Michael’s hand off of his head, and it makes his fingers twitch.
The house feels just a little more constricting.
“She’s in Heaven, Adam. She’s safe.”
“I know, I know, I just—I still miss her, and I still see her everywhere, and—” Adam freezes, clamping his mouth shut. If he had blood in here, it would’ve turned to ice.
Him and his stupid fucking mouth. What was it with him and his habit of handing people guns and then propping his own head up on a target?
“You...see her?” Michael asks, and Adam can hear the frown in his voice even without looking at him. He sighs, trying to loosen the unreasonable panic that had built up in his chest. It doesn’t help. Breathing, in here, is just an action. There’s no air. Everything stays the same, it always stays the same.
“Look, just—forget it, alright? It doesn’t matter.” His thoughts are running wild, too fast for him to process any of them. He wants Michael to use his weaknesses against him, no he doesn’t, yes he does, no he doesn’t, he...
Fuck. This would be so much easier if he could just fucking think!
He—
“It does.”
There’s agitation stirring in the pit of his stomach, his mind a whirlwind of disconcerted uneasiness that prickles uncomfortably under his skin until he feels the incessant need to dig his fingernails into his flesh until he reaches bone; just to make it stop. His teeth ache from how hard he’s clenching them together.
It’s only when he swears that his vision is beginning to tunnel like it'd done before, though, that he snaps out a, “Why?!”
His voice sounds grating to his own ears. Jesus.
“We only have each other, don’t we?” That makes Adam still, and suddenly the lassitude that’s gnawed at him ever since he’d accepted the concept of being trapped for eternity slams into him like a truck. The tightness in his torso is still there but it’s being overrun by weariness, too, and it’s odd to feel such different emotions clashing within him; like two stubborn knights on a shredded, empty battlefield. Adam’s disoriented and tense and tired. Not for the first time, he wishes he could just sleep in here. Just...ignore everything, for a while.
It’s a futile wish.
“Yeah,” Adam says, roughly, his voice barely even a whisper. “Yeah, we do.”
He turns around to finally look at Michael, and finds him barely even a foot from him, arm outstretched. He’s prepared for Michael to just do...whatever it is he wants to do, but the archangel stops, like he’s remembered something.
“...May I?”
Adam is stunned, entirely confounded, and it takes a moment for his brain to reboot enough to say, “Uh—yeah. Sure.”
Michael nods, and his fingers tap against the middle of Adam’s forehead.
Adam gasps—he feels like he’s been lifted off his feet and entirely disassembled, with his metaphysical body no longer in existence. Instead, he’s just... there. A single soul, floating in an empty ocean of nothing. He’s burning and freezing all at once, but it doesn’t hurt—they’re just feelings, just simple ways of existing that leave him with the quiet reminder that he’s still alive.
There’s something circling around him, keeping its distance but analyzing him all the same, and he realizes with a jolt that it’s Michael. More specifically, Michael's grace. He doesn’t touch him, but Adam can feel the familiar energy thrumming from him like a relentless tempest all the same.
Once upon a time, it would have inspired fear in him, as it should. He doesn’t understand why it doesn’t, now—why it just seems like they’re doing the same thing they always do, with Michael sitting across the room from him and listening to him ramble on in Enochian. It’s a level of used to it that he doesn’t know how to comprehend, so he just...doesn’t. Adam pushes the feeling off to the side, instead focusing on Michael. It’s just easier to let himself float in a dark abyss, the familiar presence like a distant fence around him.
It's...comforting, if he thinks about it for too long.
Adam pushes that off to the side, too.
And then he gets this sense that almost reminds him of something being pushed back into place—like a picture frame, hanging crookedly on the wall before someone rights it—right before he comes slamming back down into the false copy of his house, his “body” resurrected and good as new. He’s not in the living room anymore, though. Now, he’s lying back on the bed in his room, and Michael is watching him attentively, arms crossed as he leans on the wall next to the side of the bed that Adam’s laying on.
“When you were first exposed to my grace,” he murmurs, and he's more than a little distant as he says it—like he's talking more to himself than anything else, “your mind should’ve broken. It’s as I said before—you do not have the mental capacity to withstand my power. Or,” he raises his eyebrows, considering Adam carefully, “I thought you didn’t.”
Adam slowly sits up and draws his legs into a criss-cross position, taking the time to admire the fact that his mind is suddenly entirely silent for the first time in ages. He responds, though. Eventually. “What do you mean?”
“Your mind should’ve broken,” Michael repeats, “but it was only damaged.”
Adam presses his lips together in thought, pensive as he turns the words over and over in his mind. “Is it because I’m part of that whole Winchester bloodline thing?”
“Maybe. But human minds are still human minds, regardless of bloodlines.”
“And, that means...?”
“Your tenacity, it’s—” Michael pauses, his eyebrows raising like they belonged on a smile instead of the neutral line of his mouth. “It’s something, kid.”
He takes two seconds to think about that, realizes that he’s got two routes he can take with this conversation, and decides to take the lighthearted one.
“Was that a compliment, old man?”
Michael blinks, glances at the floor for a moment, and then looks back up with a sense of earnestness that stops Adam’s mind in its tracks. “Yes.”
Well, so much for the lightheartedness.
“So, when you fight Lucifer, are you...playing to wing?”
Silence.
“Or are you just winging it every time?”
No response.
Listen, Adam gets that the original point of him telling bad puns was to try and get Michael to laugh, but seeing as it’s not working he thinks he’s allowed to start snickering at the long-suffering look that Michael’s started to wear. He’s gazing forlornly in front of him like the universe has turned against him in every way, shape and form, and Adam starts full-on laughing when the archangel’s eyes finally fall on him, looking all but dead with the amount of done they are.
“Are you finished?”
“Me? Never. You should know this by now.”
Michael rolls his eyes, but there’s no indication of actual annoyance behind it. It only makes Adam grin wider. “Sadly.”
“Are my puns not up to your standards? What if I—wait, holy shit, what if I translated them into Enochian?” The raised eyebrows he gets in return to his question only makes him start laughing again, harder, this time.
For someone who’s trapped in Hell, Adam’s been in a fairly good mood, lately. Probably because he no longer has to see stupid images that his mind conjures up at every goddamn moment like shitty actors in a bad play. And because his thoughts have managed to get back in order. Somewhat, at least. It’s a work in progress.
The change of scenery probably helped, too. They’re no longer in the illusion of his house—instead, they’re at the park; the same park that Adam used to be taken to by his mother, on her days off. There aren’t any bad memories associated with this place—no getting eaten alive, no getting set on fire. It’s nice. Peaceful. Quiet, but not stiflingly so. They’ve been here a long while, and Adam had never once lost his love for it.
Adam steps onto one of the swings, grabbing onto the bar above it and hoisting himself up, twisting until he’s perched on top of it.
The archangel takes one look at him, tilts his head to the side, and, in the next instant, he’s on top of the swing frame with him. Except he’s standing, instead of sitting. Adam tries for an unimpressed look, but he doesn’t think that he quite makes it. He’s too exuberant.
“Cheater.”
Michael smiles, then, and it’s small—just a simple upwards twitching of his lips—but Adam is struck by how different it makes him look. He looks...softer. Kinder. Nothing like the cold prince he’d encountered during their first meetings, like the enraged soldier who’d held him against an invisible wall and called him a pathetic little worm. He just looks like Michael—amused and a little fond, and maybe it’s not a laugh like he’d been going for but Adam wants to count it as a goddamn win.
“Am I?”
“I’m kidding. You wanna sit down?”
“Is there a difference?” He looks down at where Adam’s sitting and then looks to his own feet, as if he’s trying to analyze the benefits of sitting down versus standing up.
“Well,” Adam says, the side of his mouth quirking up, “no, not really? You don’t have any problems balancing, so...guess not.”
After a moment, Michael sits down. Adam swears that he’s never going to be able to figure him out.
There’s a lull in their conversation, for a while, and then Adam asks, “How’re you holding up?”
Michael pauses, for a moment, like he isn’t sure what to say. “I have no purpose down here,” he sighs, at last. “For so long, I followed my Father’s Plan, and…now, there is no way for me to keep following it. Without a purpose, I...have no reason to be alive. I shouldn’t be.”
The words, spoken so simply, so matter-of-factly, leave a bad taste in Adam’s mouth, and he’s not even the one who uttered them. “I don’t...It’s not really a matter of should or shouldn’t be, is it? You’re alive, and that’s just kind of—it. Maybe you had a reason, or whatever, to live, and that reason doesn’t work anymore,” he shrugs, shaking his head a little and turning to stare fully at Michael. “So couldn’t you just...find another reason? Or, maybe, you don’t need one.”
“I was created to serve my Father, Adam,” it’s a string of words that Adam’s heard so many times, too many times. “It has always been Him. It must always be Him.”
“Just because you might’ve been created to serve someone doesn’t mean you can’t have reasons other than that to live your life, Michael. Maybe you can’t find a way to, uh, serve Him, right now, and I know we’re in Hell, but just because you can’t follow His orders doesn’t mean that your life is meaningless. If you were meant to be dead, you would’ve died by now, right?”
“I…”
“Look,” Adam says, swinging his legs a bit. “You tried your best to follow your dad’s orders, right? I mean, you even picked me over Dean just so you could get His show on the road.”
“I—” Michael starts, and it’s like he’s about to correct him, but then he stops. “I suppose, yes.”
“So, there you go. You tried your best, and it just...didn’t work out. And you can’t really do anything to fix that, can you? Not from here. But you’re still alive, even when you think you shouldn’t be. Maybe your old reason doesn’t work anymore. That doesn’t mean you can’t come up with a new one.”
Adam’s one to talk, considering he doesn’t even have a reason to stay alive, but Michael seems a little too confused, a little too lost, and Adam—wants to help. He just does.
Michael looks down, pondering it, and Adam stays quiet, lets him think.
“We’re in the Cage,” the archangel’s words are slow. Thoughtful. “I’m not sure what other reason I would...be able to find.”
“Well,” Adam chuckles, softly, “I’m not sure how much it helps, or...if it means anything, but my mom always told me to find beauty in the little things. It was probably because we didn’t have much, but it’s not like we have much here either, y’know?”
“Find...beauty. In Hell?” Michael asks, wryly, and it makes Adam snort.
“To be fair, it should be enough to eat away at our time. I mean, what’s there to look at that’s beautiful, down here? Lucifer trying to pry the bars open like a baby in a damn crib? I don’t think so.”
Michael laughs.
Michael laughs, and Adam almost falls off the top of the swing set, saved only by his hands, which grip the pole for dear life. It wouldn’t hurt if he hit the ground, he knows, but he’s been shot so far off-course in his own brain that it’s a miracle his hands reacted in the first place.
It isn’t loud—it’s breathy, soft, but if the surprised look on Michael’s face is anything to go by, it’s genuine. And it makes Adam start laughing in return, not entirely of his own accord.
Mission complete, he supposes.
“Why can’t I see your true form in here?”
Michael sends him a questioning frown, so Adam continues. “I mean, I could see Lucifer’s true form even when Sam was in control, at the cemetery. But you just look like a human in here. Do you do that on purpose?”
“I took this form because I assumed that humans preferred to interact with beings that looked similar to them,” Michael says. “You can’t see what I actually look like because this is just a manifestation of my consciousness, not my body.”
“Manifestation...so you can manifest pretty much anything in here, right?”
Michael raises his eyebrows. “Your mind works in odd ways.”
“Thanks. But am I right?”
“In a manner of speaking, yes. I can manifest anything, and, as you’ve proven, so can you. However, it won’t be real.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know that. Anyways, what if we started, like, making things?” Already, Adam’s looking around, his mind racing with ideas. He glances at the ground, a sudden thought developing. What if I...
“Making things?”
“Well, we’ve been in three places: that whole black void thing, my house, and— here, ” he spreads his hands, turning to look at Michael. “Maybe we could, I don’t know, spice it up a little? I mean, what’s stopping us?”
The archangel gives him a bemused stare. “Show me?”
“Okay, here—” Adam stands up from the bench that he was sitting on, closing his eyes and imagining, willing his idea to come forward.
When he opens his eyes, there are flowers scattered around the park, flowers that weren’t there before. There were flowers growing everywhere, to be exact, even places where they shouldn’t be—roots embedded in the thick of the plastic slide on the playground and in the crevices of the metal chain links of the swings.
And the flowers, more specifically, were petunias.
Adam was no flower guy—anything he’d ever learned about flowers was what came out of his biology classes in school—but his mom had loved petunias, and she’d always take a camera and head outside to photograph them whenever they started to bloom. He was more familiar with them than probably any other plant in the world.
Adam takes a moment to peer around at it all, biting the inside of his cheek, before turning back around. He wonders if she'd like it. “Like this.”
Michael’s gazing around at the scene before him, his expression painted with a quiet color of astonishment. When his eyes land on Adam, they’re open, searching, and there’s something else, too—something Adam can’t make out. But that’s been commonplace, lately—he can never quite figure out what’s on the archangel’s face when he’s looking at him.
Honestly, it had been easier to read him back when they hated each other.
When Michael doesn’t say anything, Adam clears his throat. “Right. So...d’you wanna give it a shot?”
Michael’s eyes fall on the ground once more, and, in an instant, there are more petunias growing up around his feet, by the bench, in the mulch. They look the same as Adam’s—bright pink, with white stripes extending inwards from the end of the petal like zebra lines.
It makes Adam grin. “Not much for variety, are you?”
Michael studies him, his brows furrowed with obvious curiosity. Adam reaches down, squatting, and takes one of the flowers between his pointer finger and thumb, twirling it absentmindedly. He doesn’t pluck it, though.
“Here, let me just…” he closes his eyes again, and when he opens them, the petunias that he’d originally created are missing their zebra stripes, shifting from a bright pink to a fine white. Michael’s still remain the same, and Adam releases his flower and sits back, triumphant.
“There. See? They’re different.”
“Is that...good?”
“Yeah, I think so,” Adam says, twisting to look around at the bunches of white and pink petunias that now litter the place he once frequented when he was little. “Things get boring when they’re always the same, don’t they? This just...makes it fun. Y’know,” he pauses, for a second, wondering if petunias were edible and despairing the fact that he’d never get to find out, “it adds to the flavor.”
Adam snorts again at his own unintentional pun—but, seeing as he didn’t he say it out loud, it makes Michael send him a strange look, which sort of makes Adam want to start laughing. Even still, Michael's face smooths out after a moment and he curls his hand as a flower appears in it, turning it over and over like he’s never seen one before.
He did that with the deck of cards, too, Adam’s brain reminds him, and he files it away for later. What he’s going to do with that information, he’s not sure. He keeps it anyway.
But, like he’s been struck by lightning, Michael straightens, his back rigid; immobile. The petunia falls from his hands, fluttering down, down, down until it lands on the ground next to him.
Michael isn’t angry. He isn’t defensive. He looks— scared. No, he looks terrified, and that frightens the hell out of Adam more than anything ever has in his life.
“Michael?” he questions, standing up, and he can hear the worry seeping through his own voice. “What is it?”
“It—no, it can’t be. It can’t be!” Michael leaps to his feet, and his eyes are wide, wider than they’ve ever been. “ She’s—!”
Then he vanishes, to Adam’s shout of “Michael!”
Fear washes over him, after that, and Adam gasps from the intensity of it before he realizes that it’s not all his. He doesn’t know how he knows it, but he does.
It only makes his own fear turn up another notch, and he starts twisting and turning around to goggle at a suddenly-empty park, trying to keep his thoughts coherent as they threaten to consume him.
There’s something wrong. There’s something terribly, terribly wrong, because Michael’s afraid and Michael isn’t supposed to be afraid of anything. And this fear isn’t just fear—it’s horror. It’s terror. It’s dread and trepidation and something so deeply-rooted in Michael’s grace that it chills Adam to his core, and the iciness of the Cage has nothing on this.
Adam—stops. He closes his eyes. He clenches his fists and tries to block out Michael’s fear as best as he can and fucking thinks, for once in his life.
Michael was—is—absolutely fucking terrified. Something’s going on. Something that doesn’t involve Lucifer, if he’s going by how Michael said she. She, like it was a curse, like it was an end. But Michael’s never mentioned a she, never spoke about anyone except God and his brothers and the other angels, on occasion.
All Adam knows, really knows, is that Michael is scared. Michael is scared, Adam’s scared, and Michael’s out there and Adam’s in here.
So, he focuses. He strains. He feels the shield that his soul had built slowly melt away into nothing, until the ground beneath his feet isn’t ground at all. Adam wills himself to the forefront of his mind, feeling the colossal current of Michael’s grace growing closer and closer, his fear thicker and thicker.
He grabs onto every last drop of determination he’s ever felt in his life, every inch of willpower that he can manage, and he pushes.
When Adam opens his eyes, he sees the Cage, for the first time in a long time. He sees Lucifer, in all the glory of his true form, pressed up against the walls of the Cage like he’s trying to hide with his wings folded inward on himself, and all Adam can read from every bit of his body language is panic, panic, panic.
He hears something creaking and groaning like it’s being bent in places that shouldn’t bend, sees how sigils on the ceiling and the walls and the floor flare and peel and burn. It’s like a shockwave is hitting—a shockwave that’s powerful enough to make the two most powerful archangels there are want to run and hide like tiny animals in a storm. And Adam can feel it too, from in here—whatever this is, it’s titanic. Cosmic, on a level he’s never experienced before.
Whatever this is, it’s…horrible. Adam doesn’t have the goddamn vocabulary to describe it right now and horrible, in every sense of the word, is all he can come up with.
And then someone screams, an incomprehensible, gut-wrenching sound that leaves Adam shaken with the force of it.
Michael.