Chapter Text
He’s there, and then he’s gone.
“Sam Winchester. My old roomie. Hug it out?”
Lucifer’s still in the Cage, both he and Michael can feel him, but he’s...somewhere else. Audible, but not there. Michael’s tense, on edge, and Adam feels shock ring through his own soul like a bell at the name.
Sam? Sam’s back?
Adam can’t hear it, but he assumes that there’s some sort of response, because Lucifer continues talking—and, from the sound of it, they’re speaking about the Darkness.
“Hmm. Oh, that leads me to my next question. Where’s the big burrito himself? Where’s God in all of this?”
He feels Michael’s grace twitch with an emotion just shy of anger and he nudges him, urging him to hang on, to focus. The grace settles after a moment or two, and Adam tunes back into the conversation, feeling Michael do the same.
It seems like they’re arguing, mostly. Adam isn’t sure of the specifics, but then Lucifer says— ”And, I need a ride out of here. I mean, I look swell in here and everything, but I’d be so much smoke topside,” and Adam thinks, the chariot.
Michael, he says, the beginnings of anxiety beginning to prickle at the back of his mind, Michael, this is what he was talking about. This is what he was doing.
He’s been taking advantage of the damaged state of the Cage, Michael seethes. He was reaching out to Sam the whole time.
And he actually came back?! Adam snaps, but it’s not at Michael—it’s at the flicker of hope that’s beginning to spark in the bottom of his heart, hope that just won’t seem to die out no matter how much he pinches it.
Maybe they’d...remembered him? Maybe—
No, he shouts at himself, stop being stupid! Stop it! You’re going to—
But what if they did? another voice murmurs, soft, insistent. What if they—
“Sam, why do you think God sent you to me? To get my help, which I only now just offered. Sam, your visions were the Word of God. You can’t say no to that.”
There’s a moment of quiet that’s so loud it could’ve made Adam’s ears ring, and then—
The Word of God? Michael utters, voice so deadly quiet that it would make any sane person duck and run for cover, a roaring inferno beginning to swirl outwards from the heart of his grace. He dares to try and pass himself off as the messenger of God’s word?
Adam immediately quells the battle that’s started to clash within himself and reaches out, brushing up against more and more of Michael’s grace until it feels like he’s almost surrounded in the electric thrum of barely-restrained power. He can feel the sheer amount of wrath that envelops him like a thousand weighted blankets but it doesn’t scare him, doesn’t overwhelm him like it would've centuries ago.
Michael, he speaks, lowering his voice until it’s just above a whisper, take it easy. It’s Lucifer, yeah? The Devil? You know how he is, what he does.
Michael says nothing, but Adam feels the storm slowly begin to abate around him—from a thunderous tsunami to choppy waves. He sends a mental picture towards the archangel, beckoning him to come inside so Adam can look at him properly, and a moment later they’ve retreated into the familiar space of Adam’s house—this time, with the conversation outside still echoing around them, like they’d never moved back at all. Michael’s expression is dark, his jaw tight, appearing right next to him on the floorboards that never creak, and Adam wastes no time in laying a gentle hand on his shoulder, prompting the archangel to turn and look at him.
How Michael could ever get so angry on behalf of the dad who’d never come back from his celestial beer run is beyond him.
Adam searches his expression, deliberately keeping himself calm, letting the feeling transmit over from him to Michael; and Michael’s expression begins to even out, his eyebrows unstitching themselves from their furrowed state to ease into something softer, more equable.
It’s what they hear next, though, that makes Adam stiffen like a board.
“Together again. Hey, Sam Winchester, did you miss me? I bet you did. I have to say, you’re extraordinarily calm given the circumstances.”
“Well, it’s pretty much exactly how God told me it was going to be. Guess I just have to go with it and play my hand.”
The last time Adam had heard that voice, it had been pitched high in a scream as it was burned, flayed, brutally murdered a thousand times over. It makes a chill race up his spine to hear it again—the first different voice he’s heard in centuries —as well as an abject feeling of horror that begins to slowly dawn on him as he realizes something.
“Sam’s—he’s back,” his grip tightens slightly from where it had been resting on Michael’s shoulder. “He’s in the Cage. With us. Again—how the fuck—?”
“Whatever warding they had set up around him,” Michael says, his tone low, “it must've failed.”
Sam— Jesus, no matter how much Adam held it against him and Dean for forgetting him here, it wasn’t as if Adam had wanted him back in. He’d seen how it went the first time around—when Lucifer broke away from his and Michael’s fighting to dig into the older man with sadistic pleasure that had sickened Adam to his stomach, had made him want to turn away, but he hadn’t known how to do it back then. The memories surface like bile in his throat and he shakes his head, a little, just to try and clear his mind.
Adam would warn him if he were down there, tell him no, Sam, you weren’t getting those visions from God! That wasn’t God! Get out of here! but he’s helpless to sit back here and listen, and all he can do is hope that Sam doesn’t say yes.
“So you see, he’s not with you. He’s never been with you. It was always...just...me. So I...I guess I am your only hope.”
“It’s never going to happen.”
“It better not,” Michael grunts, quietly. Adam can only swallow in response, finally lowering his hand.
Sam and Lucifer keep talking, and Adam can slowly feel his mind turning into a haze of anxious fretting. If Sam does say yes, what will that mean for the Earth?
Would that even matter, though? his mind takes a sudden turn for the dark, the cynical. You’ll still be down here. What happens up there won’t affect you.
You don’t know that, another voice pipes up, eerily reminding him of his hallucinations. Maybe they’ll remember you, this time. Maybe—
Shut up!
Michael’s watching him, seeing the way Adam stills at Sam’s next sentence—”Yeah. You’ll taunt me and you’ll, ah, torture me, and I’ll say no. And eventually, sooner than you think, my brother’s gonna walk through that door and kick your ass.” —probably feeling the way that hot resentment briefly thrashes in the pit of his stomach; ugly with bitterness.
Must be nice, Adam thinks, to have such profound faith that someone else is going to save you. Meanwhile, he’s still trying to suppress the hope that keeps rising up in his chest for all he’s worth; like vomit during a bad flu.
“Dean? You’re betting on Dean?”
“I always have.”
He’s not sure how he can be so embittered and so hopeful at the same time. He’s really, really not. His heart aching for them to remember him even though his mind screams that they won’t, and some odd form of desperation decides to join the mix; desperation for Sam and Dean to prove his mind wrong.
They’d come for him once before, right? So...maybe they’d just been busy all this time. Maybe—
Stop it!
“What d’you think’s gonna happen?” Adam mutters, eyes firmly on the ground. Out of his peripheral vision, he sees Michael shake his head.
“If your brother has an ounce of common sense, he’ll know not to let Lucifer in. No matter the cost,” Michael replies, but then his voice turns dark, scathing. “Of course, they’ve proven themselves to be idiots before.” He doesn’t need to say anything more. The maybe they’ll be idiots again is so clearly implied that Adam can taste it.
All he does is sigh.
There’s quiet, then—between all four inhabitants of the Cage. It’s tense, dampening, enough to leave both Michael and himself on edge. They don’t move, waiting for something, anything, but Adam eventually shifts until his shoulder brushes softly against Michael’s.
He’s scared.
Scared for the world, scared for Sam, scared of dying.
He'd once thought that death would bring him relief; that it would save him from the cold and the empty and the dark. But if the Darkness destroyed everything, then...what would happen when he died?
The thought of falling into another pit of blackness makes him twitch.
When speech from below reverberates around them once more, he perks up, latching onto the conversation with too-eager ears.
And then—
“Okay, you don't like me. I get it... I get it; sometimes I don't like me either. But Gabriel and Raphael are dead. God went out for a pack of smokes and never came back...and Michael... well, let's just say prison life hasn't really agreed with Michael. These days he's usually sitting in a corner singing show tunes and touching himself.”
There’s a single beat of the loudest stillness Adam had ever heard in his life, even overpowering the old days of isolation and darkness and insanity, and—
“Excuse me?” Michael’s voice is so indignant, so offended, that Adam can’t help the way that a snicker bursts from the back of his throat, the tight feeling in his chest easing the smallest of amounts as Michael rounds on him with a look just shy of utter betrayal, something that makes him begin to smile even wider as he chortles.
The insulted expression doesn’t last long, though. After a moment or two, it lessens, evens out, amusement sweeping lightly across his features like the stroke of an artist’s paintbrush. Adam watches as Michael’s eyes seem to rove over every inch of his face before finally flitting upwards to land on his own, turning from disgruntled to benign in a matter of seconds.
Adam thinks, not for the first time, that it’s a damn good look on him.
It suits him a thousand times better than any cold front he could ever put up in front of anyone—the slight crinkle at the corners of his eyes, the tiny quirk of his lips, the small creases that form on his forehead. Adam’s always been aware that Michael is great, in the sizable sense of the term, but it’s always moments like this that make him stumble; make him forget—for all of a split second—that the gap between a human and an archangel is vast and immeasurable, because it feels like they’re meeting each other in the middle. Like they’re walking across a tightrope from the opposite sides of some gaping canyon and joining hands when they meet at last, keeping each other steady as they balance precariously in the wind.
Like the gap isn't so big, after all.
...It's not exactly a thought process he thinks he should be having when he's in the middle of an emotional—and, y'know, apocalyptic, really—crisis, but what's one more puzzling addition to the mix? Might as well throw something else in there while he’s at it.
A yell breaks their staring contest apart, though, as a bellowed “I can!” from below has them both whipping their heads forward to listen.
They’ve started arguing. Sam, apparently, had the good sense to say no —good for the world, at least. For him, by the way things are looking...probably not so much.
“So, no. My answer is no. This isn't because of Dean, or the past, this is about me having faith in my friends, having faith in my family. We will find a way. I'm ready to die, and I'm ready to watch people I love die, but I'm not ready to be your bitch.”
Adam huffs out a breath. Some part of him wants to cheer for him—sticking it to Lucifer after all those years down here couldn’t have been easy—but the other part of him sneers at the mention of family, acrimony smoldering deep inside his heart.
The mental gymnastics were beginning to get annoying.
There’s a cry of pain that follows, and Adam winces, the earliest years of the Cage threatening to overtake him like a storm.
Then, there’s a name. And then, a voice.
"Dean...ah, the other one. Welcome to the party. Scared?"
"Not even a little."
Adam stiffens like a board, his own memories rushing towards the forefront of his mind as he struggles to keep them back.
“No! Dean! Help! It won’t open! Dean, help! Dean!”
He swallows again, but—as it turns out—it doesn’t take too much to distract him, because it isn’t even a second later that the tune of Heaven Must Be Missing an Angel starts blasting, accompanied by grunts and thuds.
On one hand, Adam kind of wants to laugh, because—holy shit, what the fuck? On the other hand... ouch.
That's some shitty music to get beat up to.
...The real problem, though, is that if they’re saying anything, Adam can’t fucking hear them over the music. Neither can Michael, apparently, by the steadily increasing amount of irritation that’s building like water against a dam on his face.
Adam would strain his ears if he thought there'd be any point to it, but whatever they're saying is drowned out by the loud sounds of Tavares and the muffled grunts that accompany it. The noise continues on and on and on—there’s a murmur or two underneath the struggling that Adam thinks he picks up, but nope. Nothing. Zip. Nada.
And then, it happens. It’s so fast. Too fast.
There’s silence. True silence, in the Cage. No more Sam, no more Dean, no more Castiel.
...No more Lucifer.
Adam is left reeling by the profundity of the stillness that settles between them, his brain struggling to make sense of that fact that Lucifer was gone.
It...didn’t make sense. Lucifer had always been there, a malignant constant that was always on the edges of both their senses, somebody to make sure of, to keep the past from repeating itself. He couldn’t just be...gone.
But he was.
And so were Sam and Dean.
The first human voices he’s heard in centuries, the people who’d insisted that they were his family, and Adam had never even heard his name mentioned.
Not once.
The flickering light of hope that had built up within him suddenly becomes fragile, breakable, disposable, his mind sneering I told you so, I told you so, I told you so over and over, a maddening loop in his brain that just wouldn't quit. But when Adam pinches his hope into nothingness like a tiny flame between his fingers, he feels something else go, too; like someone’s just pulled a rug out from under his feet. He’s nauseous, he realizes, and that nausea floods straight from the pit of his stomach to the whites of his eyes, saltwater beginning to prickle uncomfortably at the edges of his vision.
Jesus. No. Oh, no, no, no, no—
When the tears begin to drip down his face, Adam bites the inside of his cheek and turns around. He tries to hurriedly wipe them away, to no avail, sniffing as he does so, and it isn't long before he stops trying entirely; instead, he crosses his arms tightly enough across his chest that it feels like he’s squeezing the life out of himself and tries to keep his shoulders from shaking with the sob that builds up in his throat. He doesn’t know how he can get hot flashes in his own mind, but the sheer amount of emotion roiling in his belly doesn’t seem to care.
"I don't understand," Adam grits out, teeth clenched as his voice cracks. "What did I do? What did I ever do to deserve this? I don't—"
He knows that he's talking to himself more than he is Michael, who Adam assumes is still standing behind him, but the crushing realization that he's going to be stuck in here for however long the universe holds out against the Darkness is suddenly hitting him like a freight train, and it's like everything he's ever told himself—that there was no point in getting upset over cold, hard facts; that he was just stuck and that was that—is crumbling before his very eyes, turning to ashes in the flames of sick realization.
Whatever fragile thing that had developed in his chest suddenly breaks, like a loud crack of a tree branch, and the sob he'd been trying to hold back tears its way out of his throat and makes itself known to the meager little world built around him. Tears begin to stream down the line of his nose from his bowed head, some landing on the sleeve of his jacket, and he doesn't know why but seeing the stains they leave only makes him start to cry harder.
"Kid," he hears, softly, from behind him, and Adam wants to freeze and apologize but he can't, he just can't, it's all he can do to keep standing as it is, and oh, Jesus, he's actually going to die here, and he knows that he wished for death for so long but it’s going to be worse this time because there won’t be any Heaven or Hell, there won’t be anything, it’ll all just be—
"Adam," Michael says, and his voice is closer this time. Adam feels a hand on his arm, slowly turning him back around, and he looks up to see the archangel gazing at him with such undeniable, unbearable concern that it makes him grit his teeth harder, grinding his molars together as he fails to choke back the emotion welling from his throat. "Come here."
There's a gentle tug from the archangel in question, bringing Adam stumbling in his direction, and he needs no further invitation to surge forward and wrap his arms around the other's torso, clutching onto him like a lifeline while his sobs bury themselves into the jacket that's a mirror of his own.
Despite Adam's vice grip, Michael holds him softly in return, if a little awkwardly—it’s obvious that he’s never done anything like this before, but it doesn’t matter. He’s solid and warm and there, and the feeling is so undeniably foreign to him that he begins to cry with a fiercer intensity, squeezing his eyes shut and trying his best to bite back the loudest of the strangled noises that keep leaving his throat so that they’re both only left with the sound of his quiet weeping.
Michael’s hand comes up to stroke at the back of his neck, shushing him in a near-inaudible tone that Adam wouldn’t have been able to hear had he not been pressed into the firmness of his shoulder. He wants to stop crying. He wants to swallow all his emotion down back into his stomach and let it fester and fall away from him in some way that isn’t him bawling like a baby into the arms of an archangel at the unfairness of life. He wants to do anything, anything, except this.
But he doesn’t want to let go of him.
And Michael had been the one to invite him to do this, hadn’t he? The delicate sweep of his thumb against the back of his neck, brushing softly against his hairline as his fingers, didn’t seem like someone who particularly minded the fact that Adam was shaking like a leaf in his arms.
There’s a tight ball of his own making swirling in the center of his chest, thick with the sludge of rotten emotions that ache to be released. The mounting pressure on his rib cage makes him feel like all the blood in his body has coagulated, seeping inwards and outwards until it converges on and squeezes his heart in a roaring message of let go, let go, let go.
And this, Adam wants to let go. He wants to unravel it like yarn until there’s no more weight in his chest, until he can finally feel some of that peace again—the peace that Michael had brought to him before, but...
When Michael’s ministrations send an involuntary shudder up his spine, that’s when something in his mind makes his decision for him. When it makes him lets go of his dwindling rope and just—falls.
For the first time in centuries, he lets himself cry.
He cries for his loss of freedom, for all the pain he’d endured at Lucifer’s hand, for years and years and years of silence and isolation and darkness . He cries for his lost friends, his normal life, the ability to sleep and eat and do anything without the knowledge that it was fake. He cries for his humanity, how it seemed to slip through his fingers like sand.
For the first time, Adam cries for his mom.
And, through it all, Michael never moves away.
His hand keeps up its smooth, steady motions, arm wrapped neatly around Adam’s shoulders in a way that’s still just a little too stiff, a bit too tense, but feather-light on his body all the same.
Eventually, the tears flow to a stop. They had to, right? Like everything else in his life. He's left with barely enough energy to keep himself standing, face still pressing into Michael's jacket, forehead resting limply against his shoulder.
Adam isn’t angry, isn’t upset, isn’t frustrated or sad or even afraid of dying, anymore. He’s just...exhausted. Empty. It’s hard to describe—he doesn’t feel numb, not like he used to be. He feels like he’s run one too many marathons, like a river run dry.
Tired. He’s so, so tired.
Michael shifts, then, and Adam’s senses slam back into him for all of a second as he realizes that this is still an archangel he’s latched onto—invitation or no—and this is probably not any sort of position that Michael wants to be in. He jerks his head up and quickly attempts to extricate himself, an apology already beginning to form on his tongue before he realizes that Michael has transported them both into Adam’s bedroom. The archangel lets him move back, though, pulling away with one hand still remaining on his shoulder, steadying him as he peers at Adam’s face.
Adam can’t even begin to try and think about how he probably looks by now—red-rimmed eyes and a dull, weary gaze, for starters—so he doesn’t, instead choosing to stare at the inner rim of Michael’s collar as he’s being inspected. There’s a small flicker of something that dashes across Michael’s grace, but it’s too quick for Adam to catch.
Then, there’s another shift, and Adam finds himself standing right next to the bed.
“You should rest,” Michael says, his voice low and even. Adam gives a wry little snort as he looks towards the bed and then back up at Michael.
“You know it’s impossible for me to sleep in here, right? Eternal torture, and all that.”
He shakes his head. “I didn’t say sleep, kid, I said rest,” and with that, Michael gently pushes him down until Adam’s sitting on top of the bed, hand still resting on his shoulder.
Adam looks up at him—confusion probably evident on his face—but Michael seems insistent, so he decides to humor him and maneuvers himself until he’s laying back down against the pillows, raising his eyebrows up at him and folding his hands across his stomach.
Adam isn’t sure what Michael expects to happen until he feels it—feels Michael’s grace surround him. His soul. Not just their more recent arrangement where they constantly kept in lingering contact with each other, either; he can feel it at the core of his being as he’s entirely cocooned in layers upon layers of archangel grace, and there has to be at least a thousand Enochian words flying through his mind that could describe this but the only thing he can think of in English is...power. It’s power in its purest form, and he sucks in a breath at the feeling, eyes closing as he tries not to lose himself in it.
It feels like he’s swimming, adrift in an endless ocean made of light. Like fire, without the sweltering heat.
It isn't long before he stops trying to find some sort of ground beneath his feet and lets himself be swept away, allowing the feeling of Michael’s grace to replace whatever hollow void his tears had left behind. It's not sleep, but it's pretty damn close, almost reminding him of the time after Lucifer had attacked, when all he’d been doing was existing —and, really, that’s all he’s doing now. It’s all he wants to do.
So he does.
Adam isn’t sure how long he stays like that, basking in the sheer amount of sensation, but what he does know is that—like all other times down here—he gets...lonely. He's so used to the biting ache of the feeling that it's easy to pinpoint, scratching at the front of his mind like an unwanted animal, and he begins doing his best to focus—directing random thoughts towards Michael in an attempt to get his attention, wherever he is.
It works. There's a distinct difference between the rest of Michael's grace and his main point of his consciousness, and Adam can discern between the two when he feels a denser, brighter flow of energy come his way, surrounding him in tandem with the rest of it.
Stay? Adam finally manages, quiet Enochian flowing from whatever he is right now to the archangel above. There's a ringing, then, Michael's true voice echoing through every piece of him down to his very atoms, and Adam would smile at the silent ripple of affirmation he receives if he had a form.
Instead, he lets the beginnings of quiet relief start to wash over him as Michael curls himself around Adam's soul, a warmth carried with his arrival that differs from the outer banks of his grace.
Maybe it doesn't fix anything. Maybe they're still trapped down here, waiting for their demise. Maybe God never came back for Michael, and maybe the Winchesters completely forgot about him, but...they have each other, don't they?
They're here.
They're together.
His mind finally conjures up another word for...this, pulled from the recesses of his mind like some sort of long-lost childhood memory: divine.
Michael looks pained again.
Time had passed. Adam doesn’t want to ask how much. He doesn’t care anymore. It doesn’t matter. There was no point in trying to process something so out of his reach.
He does his best to fill the hole left inside of him—and, mostly, it’s been working. He sticks close to Michael and Michael to him, both gravitating towards each other even more now with the threat of Lucifer gone.
...As bad as the Devil had been, he had still established himself as another sign of life—a sign that they weren’t entirely alone. But now, they were. And if Adam let himself think about it too much and too hard, he could almost trick himself into believing that they were the only two people in existence, that all that had ever existed was them and the Cage and the cold.
He kept these thoughts hidden away from Michael, though—the archangel had started to...well, if Adam didn't know any better, he would say that Michael had started to hover after Adam’s little breakdown, his concern much more open than Adam had ever seen it before.
He doesn't mind. He's doing the same thing in return, after all.
The thing is, he doesn’t know why Sam and Dean’s abandonment hit him so hard. They’d already done it once before, right? He really shouldn’t have reacted so strongly.
Maybe...maybe it wasn’t so much their action that tipped him over the edge so much as it was that he’d needed a reason to go over the edge. He had to have been a ticking time bomb, right? All that shit that he’d shoved down since he’d first fallen down here had to have come out sometime.
Adam remembers the tightness that had forced his way out of his chest and swallows, trying to chase the thought away.
Bitterness still manages to spring up within him at the thought of Sam and Dean, though, clawing deep scratches under the skin of his hands until he looks down and finds them balled tightly in two separate fists. He extricates his fingers from their uncomfortable hold, biting the inside of his cheek.
Regardless of his inner musings, Michael looks pained again. His brows are drawn together and his eyes are squinting the tiniest bit as they avert from Adam's face to the floor, and this time Adam doesn’t want to let it slide. There had to be a damn good reason that something had been affecting Michael so badly that it had been physically showing up on him for centuries, and Adam wants to know what it is. Wants to help, if he can.
“Something’s hurting you,” he states, and Michael jerks his head up to look at him. When he says nothing, Adam prods him again.
“Is it…” he pauses, pressing his lips together as he grasps for straws on a subject he knows nothing about. “I don’t know, being in here with me? Does it do something to you?”
He has no time to dwell on the idea of that before Michael is shaking his head, surprise flaring out over his face.
“No, that isn’t it,” a breath of a chuckle slips past his throat, like he’s remembering something funny. “The opposite, actually.”
When Adam cocks his head to the side, waiting for an answer, Michael sighs. He looks as tired as Adam feels all the time, and he hates it. Hates that anything could make Michael look like that.
“The Cage was designed to imprison and punish Lucifer,” Michael mutters, his quiet voice suddenly laced with a rancorous timbre, but then it devitalizes so quickly that it gives Adam whiplash. “Since I'm an archangel as well, the effects of it are also felt by me. It’s…” he sighs, again, and it makes Adam reach out for him on impulse, gently taking his hand and running his thumb across the tops of his knuckles in a manner he hopes is soothing.
Michael glances down at their joined limbs, the tenseness that had built up in his shoulders slowly seeping away. “I fought him for so long, out there, because I thought that...if I were to endure penance, to show my Father that I could—” he pauses, for a moment. “I thought that He would release us. That He would return.”
“And He didn’t,” Adam mutters back.
Michael doesn’t look back up. “I’m sure He must have had His reasons.”
Yeah, right, Adam wants to snort, but instead he just hums in acknowledgement and leans down to rest his chin on his arm, nearly eye-level with the surface of the table. He keeps up the slow, rhythmic stroking of his thumb—a comforting action for them both, it seems.
He wishes he could do something to take away Michael’s pain. It’s hardly fair that Adam got to sit in here like this while Michael was constantly going through enough agony to make his composure come apart at the seams. It wasn’t like he had it good, but for him to exist in relative peace while Michael suffered without end? It didn’t sit right with him, made something roll over deep in his gut.
But...he'd said the opposite, actually.
Something clicks in his brain, then— Michael's apology. How it had come after he'd looked like he was in pain, when he'd seemed tired beyond belief. He grabs hold of the memory, turns it over and over in his mind, watches Michael's eyes, his face, his actions, his movements.
"I am...sorry." You're in pain. I am, too. I understand now. I didn't realize. I'm sorry.
He's not sure how he knows it, how it even makes sense, but when he thinks about it...he can hear it. He just can. Adam sees it in the way his head had dipped down, the way he'd gazed at him with such intense sincerity, the way his hand had traced the bed cover like it was something special, the way his body had seemed...slumped.
Tired.
And Adam knew tired.
It's...strange, but not. It's more strange that he's just realizing it now, honestly.
He sucks in a deep breath, prompting Michael's gaze to turn curious, questioning, and files his thoughts away for later analysis. For now, though, he steers the road back to regular conversation.
“Y’know,” Adam says, idly, “we haven’t died yet.”
“We haven’t.”
“Maybe something happened. Maybe they found some way to beat the Darkness.”
Michael’s tone turns dry. “It took my Father and four archangels to beat her, the first time.”
“Yeah,” Adam replies, looking up to raise his eyebrows at him. “But we’re still alive.”
Michael seems to consider it, but he doesn’t say anything in return. Instead, he slowly turns his hand over, still in Adam’s hold, the tips of his fingers stretching to gently brush against the pulse-point of Adam’s wrist.
There was probably a word for this type of action, back on Earth.
Adam doesn’t want to touch it with a ten-foot pole.