Chapter Text
After the star, it’s like another switch has been flipped, and suddenly they’re going everywhere. Adam sees the formation of galaxies, the collisions of asteroids, rocky planets here and there that make Adam smile when he kneels down and feels the surface of each and every one of them, when he looks up at the stars so different from the ones on Earth.
It’s nothing compared to the real thing, like Michael said before. But it’s something new, something incredible, and he can’t seem to stop himself from grinning and laughing every time the archangel whisks them off to location after location, weaving the soft fabric of the false realities around them with the power of his infallible memory.
Michael always watches him when they go somewhere new, grace threading warmly around his soul as Adam spins to take in all the sights. Sometimes, when Adam sits down to properly take in the scenery after the initial excitement has passed, Michael will sit down next to him too; they’ll sit there together, shoulder pressing against shoulder, seated with their legs dangling on expanses of black or white or gray—or stars, even. And sometimes, when Adam least expects it, he can feel a certain sense of wonder—different, but much like his own—trickling softly from Michael over to him.
“Your dad had a hell of an imagination,” Adam murmurs, staring down from their bird’s-eye view at the the sparkling stars that form an elliptical galaxy beneath them. If nothing else, bounces around at the base of his tongue, but he doesn’t release them.
Michael’s lips curl into a smile, huffing out a small laugh, and Adam turns to him to watch his eyes grow distant with old memories. He looks ancient again, eyebrows pulling down at the sides to make his face a little more open, a little more soft. Weary, but time-honored all the same.
Somehow, it doesn’t make the gap between them widen. Michael doesn’t feel distant. He’s just there, timeless and existing only in this moment at the same time. And Adam understands—he is too, in his own little human way.
Is it even that anymore? Adam’s mind speaks up. Do you count? You were a bad example before, but what about now? Does the word even have meaning? You weren’t even human enough for Sam and Dean to save—
Stop. That isn’t it. Stop it.
“He did,” Michael replies, and just like that, Adam senses the waters they’re about to dip their feet in and immediately goes for a change of subject.
“What did you think about Earth?” he asks, and the archangel’s gaze meets his. “When it was made?”
Michael hums, his eyes falling in thought, and Adam brings his legs back up to hug to his chest.
“I didn’t think anything, at first,” he says at last. “It was just another planet of my Father’s. It’s when he began to add the detail to it that I began to see it for its beauty. Eden was…” he chuckles again, a barely-there sound, and Adam leans his cheek on his knee as he watches; as he listens. “It was beautiful. And so was the rest of it.”
Adam smiles, humored and a little tired. “And then humanity came along, right?”
Michael raises an eyebrow and tips his head in a little well, you’re not wrong motion, his own mouth pulling up, and it makes Adam chuckle.
“Fair enough. Not like we’re the best things ever created.”
“My Father certainly seemed to think so.”
He snorts. “If that’s what He wants to think, then sure, whatever. But a lot of us are assholes. I mean, not all of us—” he amends, thinking of his mom with a pang that shoots through his heart, “—but there are definitely some real dicks in the apple barrel.”
Adam’s fairly sure that’s not how the saying goes.
“But that’s pretty much just every species, right? We’ve all got our douchebags.” he taps his fingers on the side of his leg. There was a time where the fabric of his jeans had feeling, but now that feeling is gone—it’s just a part of him, at this point. He’d stopped trying to change clothes a long time ago; there was no point if his brain couldn’t come up with rational designs for t-shirts anymore. Nowadays, if he tries, something always goes wrong. The memories from his childhood hardly help—those clothes were, of course, too small.
He wasn’t sure why he’d started thinking about clothes. Maybe it’s because Michael’s suddenly staring at him with curious eyes and Adam doesn’t know if the fluttering in his stomach would be able to handle that with any sort of finesse.
“I’m sure you know all about that, though,” Adam says, suddenly, tacking on a cheeky smile for effect.
Control.
Michael’s eyes narrow in thinly-veiled playfulness as he detects the mock-insult, an incredulous smirk blooming to fruition on his face faster than Adam can blink.
It’s more distracting than it has any right being.
“Do I?”
“Well, you didn’t spend thousands of years ruling a bunch of them for nothing.”
Adam, with all of his heart, cannot help it—with every second that passes by of Michael peering at him like he’s about to kick his ass, it becomes more and more difficult to restrain the laughter that threatens to burst past his teeth at any given moment. He presses his lips together, shoulder shaking from the effort, but when the archangel finally lets his own smile take control of his expression like the brilliance of a sun breaking past the clouds after a gloomy day, Adam—
Well, he fucking loses it. To put it lightly.
He laughs and laughs until Michael’s smirk comes back, and Adam doesn’t even get a warning before the invisible platform he’d been sitting on gives way beneath him, dropping him straight down into the galaxy they’d been previously watching.
Adam laughs the whole way down, feeling the good-natured nudge of Michael’s grace against his soul all the while.
He probably should be scared; what with the whole falling straight down thing and all. But he has no reason to be, does he?
It’s Michael.
The center of the galaxy opens up under him, a pinprick of another place and time awaiting him at the end of the line, and Adam feels an exuberant fondness crash into him like a tidal wave—whether it’s his or Michael’s, though, is a question that he has no answer to.
Maybe it’s both of theirs, mixing and twining together until it joins at the seams of the space where their beings connect; another winding rope that serves to strengthen... them. Strengthens the here and now and the godforsaken eternity they have to spend in this rotting little corner of the world.
The hole swallows him up, and Adam laughs a little more when he sees what’s at the end of it, twisting his body so he lands on his back against the cushions of the couch. He bounces lightly, the slightest amount—like he hadn’t dropped millions of miles through the nonexistent air—and beams brightly when the archangel’s face materializes above him, leaning over him as Adam splays haphazardly across the poor piece of furniture.
“Fancy meeting you here, halo,” he teases.
“I’m sure,” Michael responds, deadpan and amused all at once. Adam’s still grinning when he pulls himself up, making room that the archangel immediately claims as per their usual arrangement.
A few moments of companionable silence pass between them—time that Adam uses to bring his ridiculous amounts of smiling down to a minimum—and then he blows out a breath of air and leans against Michael’s shoulder again.
“You holding up alright?”
The softness of his own voice surprises him, a stark contrast from the lighthearted air from the moments prior, but he has to ask. He has to know.
“Yeah,” Michael says, equally as quiet. “It’s...not unbearable.” Not enough to let it show, at least.
Adam reaches out for Michael in his chest, then, doing his best to push against the endless ocean of his grace with the miniscule scape of his own soul with as much gentle comfort as he could manage.
He wishes he could do more.
Don’t, Michael’s voice whispers in his mind, and Adam blinks in surprise as he realizes that he’d made that thought public. Kid, there’s nothing you can do.
I know, Adam responds. But still.
He carefully opens up another part of himself, then, the part that wants—more than anything—to help, to take the pain of his only friend away; lets it flood over from himself to Michael in tandem with the silent solace that he does his best to maintain.
The archangel shifts, then, and Adam raises up from his shoulder only slightly as he watches it go up and around, resting against the back of the couch with open eyes adorning the face it's attached to like an invitation, and—oh.
His mind comes entirely to a stop. His body, however, has other plans, shifting forwards like it’s second nature to curl into the body next to him as Michael drapes his arm entirely around his own shoulders, a comforting weight that feels like it belongs there, of all things.
If he weren’t so preoccupied with quelling the racing butterflies under his skin and rebooting his mind back into working order, Adam would wonder which of his memories Michael had drawn this action from; he doubts that this was any sort of movement an archangel would do. It wasn’t like their true forms were built for it. As it is, he takes a deep breath, exhaling long and slow through his nose as he sinks into it, lets himself relax.
It’s just a feeling. It won’t do anything. Control it.
When he, at last, manages to string coherent lines of thought once more, he becomes aware of Michael soothing his arm with his thumb, which is—all sorts of things he doesn't want to think about.
Michael seems to have sunken deep into thought. He latches onto that observation like a lifeline. It's easier to focus on, less likely to send him spiraling over the edge of some unknown abyss.
Penny for your thoughts? Adam tentatively sends over, hoping to everything in the known universe that that’s all he sent over. He doesn’t trust himself to speak, as silly as it sounds; he knows that his vocal cords aren’t real, but the idea that they’ll fail him still creeps up on him all the same.
He wonders, idly, where that points to on the human-to-??? scale. If such a scale were to exist. Which it doesn’t, because he doubts that there’s ever been any record of a human having their body piloted by an archangel and then left down in Hell to rot for centuries.
Here’s to being new, Adam supposes.
It just occurred to me, Michael muses, that I should probably be writhing in pain right now. I hardly think this is what my Father intended when He created the Cage.
Adam snorts, taken off-guard by the blatant confession. Is that good or bad?
...Good, I think.
He swallows, pressing a little closer, uncertain of the answer he’s about to receive even if he isn’t afraid of it. Even if it’s not what He intended?
Michael is silent for a long, long time, his thumb still gently stroking against his upper arm. Adam can remember a time where his answer would’ve been something different, something immediate, and it makes him remember a time where Michael had clung so fiercely to the certainty of God’s return, when the release of the Darkness had set that hope ablaze like the flames they'd gone up in at Stull.
He isn’t here, Michael comes up with, in the end, and Adam takes another deep breath and closes his eyes.
Maybe he isn’t an archangel, but he knows the erosion of identity when he sees it.
If nothing else, he could make sure that Michael wouldn’t have to be alone if—or when, depending on how eternity passes them by—he stopped long enough one day to notice that his carefully-constructed castle of sand had been enveloped entirely by the waves of the greatest ocean of all: time.
He could do that much.
Adam’s sitting on the couch again. This time, though, his feet are kicked up over the back, his head dangling off the cushions with his arms stretched back to touch the ground. He’s in the middle of his sixth rendition of some song that he’s pretty sure used to be rock’n’roll—he’s not certain that whatever’s he made it to be down here falls under that category anymore.
His mom used to like it, he remembers that much. Those songs are really the only ones he remembers.
“Kid, why are you upside-down?”
Michael’s seated on the floor in front of him, watching him. Adam pauses, tucking his chin to his neck to look up and grin at the archangel. “Don’t know. Why aren’t you?”
The archangel’s eyebrows climb to his hairline, tipping his head in brief consideration, and in a flash he’s seated next to adam on the couch—hands folded loosely across his stomach, legs draped over the back, head tilted back against the edge of the cushion. Adam lets delighted surprise come to the forefront of his expression as Michael twists his face into a thoughtful frown.
“Can’t figure out the point, can you?”
“No,” Michael admits, sounding a bit wry. “But there...isn’t a point, is there?”
“Bingo.”
He shakes his head, the corners of his eyes crinkled in a way that Adam finds himself drawn to, studying the creases and lines of his face with an audacious sense of idleness.
“It’s strange,” Michael says, and Adam tunes in to the sound of his voice to listen. “I haven’t done things for my own enjoyment since before I ruled Heaven.”
He trails off, then, biting the inside of his cheek, and the origins of the mundane action are not lost on Adam. Michael doesn’t even seem to notice that he’s doing it; or, if he does, it’s not registering through the connection of their tangled beings.
“And now you’re sitting upside-down on a fake couch with a human in Hell, of all places?” he finishes for him, a jaded tint overcoming his mind for all of a second before it vanishes, lost to sea.
Michael smiles, seemingly more to himself than anything. His eyes flicker upwards—to the ground—before landing back on Adam’s own. “Yes.”
Adam reaches for him, then, and Michael’s response is immediate, their hands joining together to rest gently in the space where the couch cushions separated between them. Their fingers interlace, a few gentle sparks racing up his arm that sends warmth piercing straight through his heart, comfortable and earth-shattering all at once, and he fleetingly wonders how an oasis could so easily disguise itself as a storm; how the line between peace and chaos had become so broadened and so blurred all at once. He’s walking down that same line now, with everything so mixed up that it bleeds into him like he’s an empty canvas waiting patiently for color to make him come to life.
It shouldn’t make sense, all the intangible fabrics of serenity in his chest and all the bedlam that makes up the very threads of it—a quilt, almost, draping itself without a sound over the both of them. A quilt of quietude born of the tattered clothes of battle, created for rest but never letting them forget their tempestuous minds, their worn beings.
It shouldn’t make sense, and it doesn’t. Or maybe it does, and he’s just reaching out and grasping the wrong pieces of cloth at the wrong time.
Make up your mind, he scolds the sparks, tapping his finger against Michael’s hand absentmindedly as he tries to gather his thoughts in the wake of their prolonged eye contact.
“For what it’s worth,” Adam says, struggling between the desire to look away and the even stronger desire to dig his feet into the sands of time and never let this moment go. “You’re good at remembering how it works.”
Michael’s grace pulses with enough kindliness that it almost aches. If only he’d known, all those centuries ago, that care did still exist; that it wasn’t just a long-lost memory of his mom’s smile, that wasn’t just his own desperate attempts to feel human. It was real, in the here and in the now, and his days of coveting for it were long gone.
He can’t resist tacking on an “...Even if you’re old,” though. He does have a sense of normalcy to keep up.
Michael laughs.
“Copulation.”
“...”
“The rear of a donkey.”
“...”
“Hole of the—okay, really. Why doesn’t Enochian have any curse words?”
“Maybe because we’ve never had them? The closest we have are words in reference to my brother. Or Hell,” Michael’s expression takes on a disdainful air for a moment before relaxing again.
“The wicked one,” Adam sounds out, the words stringing together from the vocabulary that had been fortuitously passed over to him all those years ago.
Michael nods, and even now, Adam can feel smallest shift of his grace at the epithet—so astronomically tiny, in fact, that if the archangel hadn’t literally been on top of his soul he doubts he would’ve ever felt it. He chooses not to comment on it.
“Enochian never changed with the times, huh,” he ponders out loud, holding his fist in his hand from where he’s leaning his elbow on the table.
“It wouldn’t have,” the archangel sniffs, and Adam raises an eyebrow and lets a crooked grin push its way onto his teeth at the note of pride that enters Michael’s voice. “I kept Heaven running just the same as it did when my Father was there.”
Then he pauses, and the pride seems to float away, dissipating from the set of his shoulders like smoke in the wind. “And even that landed me here.”
Was it all even worth it? Everything, for nothing? Is what Adam hears, a silent question that flits around in Michael’s mind like a hummingbird that attempts to forcefully bury itself as soon as it comes.
But Adam still hears it; still understands how rocky the territory they’ve just landed themselves in is.
He takes a breath, letting the smile on his own face even out into something more gentle. “Look, Michael—you couldn’t have known that you’d end up in Hell. Even if we’re stuck down here...I mean, I've said it before; you tried your best to do what He said up there, right? That’s pretty much all anyone can ever do. Ever. It didn’t work out, yeah, but that’s just...life, isn’t it? It might’ve been a first for you, with you being—” he gestures aimlessly at Michael, who’s staring wide-eyed at him, “—you, but...that’s life, too. Maybe things don’t have to be worth anything. Just take what you got and keep going, yeah? Or something like that.”
He tries to pour as much sincerity as he feels in his words, gesturing with his hands and tilting his own head and hoping that Michael understands, that he can feel the depths of it.
Michael blinks, and he doesn’t speak. Instead, his eyes lower, his arms slipping down from the crossed position they’d found themselves in to fold quietly in his lap. Adam can sense his grace racing with thoughts, but he turns a blind eye—a blind ear? Blind mind?—to them, keeping himself from prying. He doesn’t move to touch him, either. Some things required focus, and some focus required as much space as they felt they could give each other in a world where everything of theirs was shared.
And this was delicate business, too, a place where the silly little wings of butterflies did not belong. This was a seed, planted in a garden that needed trust instead of sunlight and honesty instead of water. There was no room for the swarm of buzzing bees that erupted in Adam’s brain when Michael so much as grinned in his direction.
He was glad he could shove them aside when he needed to. Mostly.
“If,” Michael says, and the entirety of Adam’s attention suddenly snaps to him. “If I were to...keep going, how would I do that?”
The archangel’s voice is level, even, giving nothing away, but Adam is floored by the question regardless—his mind jumps to Michael’s real form once more before it shies away from it in the same way as before.
“Just do the same way you’ve been doing up until now,” he hears himself murmur a second later, almost shocked by the fact that he can get his lips to work. “Remembering isn’t the only thing you’re good at.”
Michael meets his eyes at that, gaze deep and searching, and Adam bares as much of his soul as he can afford to without giving away the unnecessary, irrelevant softness he had in his heart when the other being so much as blinked, lets him look straight through him with no qualms about it at all.
It could be moments that pass them by. It could be years. Adam hardly knows the difference anymore; it was better to just let things coalesce, after so long. They all felt the same.
But, however long it had been, he feels something that had wound itself tightly in the expanse of Michael’s grace begin to come loose—taking the pressure of a tight coil off of a rope with already-frayed edges—and Adam nods.
He isn’t sure why he nods. Maybe it’s supposed to be encouraging, or empathetic, or something else that he can’t keep up with right now—his present state of mind is more colors than rational thought, really.
He nods, though, and Michael offers him a little half-smile in return, and Adam suddenly wonders what it would look like under different circumstances; if it would look less pained if it were silhouetted against the blue of the afternoon sky than it would the too-familiar backdrop of his fake house, his true form still scorching and burning with every second they sat in the Cage.
The mess of cards on the floor has them both stumped.
“D’you think we might’ve been playing different games?” Adam asks, wondering how he’d managed to end up with an entire hand of checkered, red-squared cards that mocked him from where he'd laid them out on the floor, trying to take the chance to properly look at them. He’s gotten so used to just summoning cards and launching into new games that he might’ve forgotten to focus on which game they were playing, which would’ve...changed the cards in his hands.
“I’d think so,” he gets in return, as Michael stared down at his own cards on the wooden boards. Numbered cards.
Adam snorts. “Alright, so do we mark that down as a tie, or do we pretend it never happened?”
Michael spares a quick glance for Adam’s pile, and then sends him a mischievous smirk. “Seeing as you have...the hand that you have,” he says, and grins when Adam sends him a mock-dirty look. “I think we can forget it ever happened.”
“Yeah, yeah. For the record, I don’t know how this happened either,” he sweeps his hand accusingly down at the cards.
“I’m sure.”
“I wasn’t paying attention! Actually,” Adam stops, a thought suddenly occurring to him. “Why didn’t you notice?”
The archangel’s smile is reticent. “I wasn’t paying attention,” he parrots, turning Adam’s words against him, and he thinks that Michael’s gotten way too good at joking around. He can’t even tell whether he’s kidding or not on the surface. He'd look deeper to check, but looking deeper during a game would be cheating. Obviously.
And thinking about the potential of Michael not kidding and being distracted during the game presented the question of what he was being distracted by—which Adam's mind begged to latch on to and puzzle out, since Michael had shifted back over into a fairly decent state of mind after his short little crisis and there was a very, very limited amount of things in here that could've diverted his attention.
The pain scale had been on the lower side in more recent times, too, so that probably hadn't been it.
...Maybe it was—
Nope. Knock it off, Milligan. You're too old to be acting like a teenager, the rational part of his brain suddenly cuts in. Thankfully.
Adam should probably start using it more often.
"Hm," he settles for, and moves his attention back to the cards, trying to make sure they were all the same this time. In an attempt to get his spazzing mind back under the realm of control, he shoots a question into the air.
"Anything going on out there?" Though check-ups on the outside world haven't really been a thing since the days of Lucifer and the release of the Darkness, it's a good excuse as any. He doesn't particularly want to move to go check for himself, either. Michael's mental X-ray vision comes in handy like that.
Michael shrugs and tilts his head up the smallest bit, eyes turning distant as he looks beyond the veil of their imaginary world, and suddenly Adam knows something's wrong.
He can feel something wrong, vibrating through every blood vessel of the body he's all but lost connection to, and the discomfiting sense of wrongness is emanating directyl from Michael, who's turned stiff as a goddamn board.
Eyes still distant, his head still tipped back, Michael still looks as unearthly as ever—and yet, when he forces out a strangled "Adam—" that leaves Adam on high alert, his voice is anything but.
"What is it?" he replies, hearing his own voice turn sharp with worry. "Michael—"
"The Cage," Michael says, almost chokes out, and Adam's mind runs through a billion and a half different apocalyptic scenarios before the archangel's eyes are here again and Adam feels wholly compressed under the intensity of his gaze, dreading his next words with an unyielding fervor, icy chills jolting down his spine.
And then Michael opens his mouth, and everything stops.
"It's open."