Chapter Text
Adam really does try not to think about Michael. He doesn’t want to listen, doesn’t want to even consider, not again, but he can’t help himself.
He’d been willing to say yes before. More than willing, excited to. Sure, when you’re in Heaven and a bunch of angels show up and tell you they need your help to save the world, you don’t say “thanks, but no thanks.” At the very least, you consider it.
But he’d truly been ready, even after being jerked around between Zachariah and his brothers, even after he’d let all of them get in his head. He’d been ready for Michael, and deep down, he knows why.
He’d believed.
He’d believed them when they said it was the only option, that he was their last hope, that the destruction Lucifer and his armies would wreak if unchecked upon earth would be far greater than any collateral incurred in fighting him.
He’d believed that Lucifer needed to be stopped.
And maybe…he still believes. In the last point he certainly does.
The angels hadn’t been lying completely, after all. Left out a few key details, but they hadn’t lied about the crux of it. He even had been their only hope, from a certain point of view.
And no matter how he tries to reason with himself, how many times he reminds himself of everything Zachariah did, and on whose orders he did them, he keeps circling back to the fact that Lucifer has to be stopped.
Michael can do that. All he needs a vessel.
It doesn’t help that Sam and Dean aren’t talking to him about any of it. He’s accepted, mostly, that they don’t yet have a working plan on how to derail the Apocalypse, but they should at least be talking about it. They’re on the phone to Bobby, or to other hunters regularly enough, giving warnings, looking for info, trying to find Castiel, and Sam spends almost every free moment reading, but they aren’t discussing it with him. He tries to bring it up more than once, but Dean always just tells him not to worry, while Sam simply watches him consideringly.
Adam’s not even sure if they talk to each other about it, though maybe they do, and are disagreeing, or are just trying not to do it in front of him. He’s walked out of the bathroom or come back to the car to plenty of tense silences and cut-short conversations.
It's frustrating as hell, made all the worse by the feeling that he’s being watched whenever he’s out in public. It’s not like he’s ever left alone, even when they stop at a motel for the night, but there’s a constant feeling of strange eyes on him. Sam and Dean never say anything, don’t act any different than they have been, and Adam tells himself that it’s probably just all in his head, that he’s being paranoid. But it keeps getting worse, and he can’t help but eye the people walking past them on the street or sitting in the booth next to theirs when they stop for lunch. Any one of them could be an angel. Or a demon. Or a ghoul or some other supernatural creature that wants them dead. He would never know.
He just wants it to stop.
They pull out a knife, one that looks like it had been stolen from a kitchen knife block. Maybe even his kitchen. Long cuts are sliced down the lengths of his arms. Not too deep – they don’t want him to die too quickly. He tastes better fresh and alive apparently – but deep enough that he bleeds. Bleeds enough for them to bend their heads and lick at the blood.
One of them uses the knife to cut his side too, an incision long and deep enough for it to push its fingers into. As he feels them moving inside him, feels the agony of the wound, his insides, shifting and stretching around the hand, he thinks hysterically of his 7th grade History class. About mummification and how the ancient Egyptians would do this to their dead; cut open their abdomen to get at their organs.
Adam wishes he was dead.
The ghoul pulls its hand free, holding something bloody, eyes lit up like it had just found a treat. It tips its head back, pops the organ or bit of flesh or whatever piece of him it had taken into its mouth. Adam watches it chew, swallow, and when it leans back over him, face hovering above his, all he sees is himself.
Adam lurches out of bed, stumbling for the bathroom, ignoring Sam’s concerned call from where he’s sitting at the table. He manages to find the light switch with his eyes half closed before dropping to his knees in front of the toilet, only just making it before he’s bringing his dinner back up.
Sam follows him, hovering in the doorway. Normally they both pretend the nightmares aren’t happening, but this is the first time Adam’s been sick afterwards.
“Adam?”
Adam just shakes his head, and Sam falls silent again.
The images linger behind his eyes longer than they usually do, and the chill of the tile seeps through the thin fabric of his pants. He shivers in-between dry heaves.
He’s alive. He’s alive. The ghouls are dead and he’s alive.
Eventually his stomach settles, the nightmare beginning to fade away, and when he pulls himself shakily to his feet, he finds Sam standing there with a glass of water. He doesn’t say anything when he hands it over, just watches Adam rinse out his mouth and then drain the rest.
“Thanks,” Adam says as he hands the empty glass back.
Sam nods, a half-smile, half grimace on his face when he pats him on the shoulder. Adam follows him back into the room, but pauses halfway to his bed, the idea of trying to fall back to sleep entirely unappealing. Sam notices, having deposited the glass in the sink and returned to his laptop.
“Did you maybe want to, I mean, if you weren’t feeling tired, I could use some help going through these.” He gestures to the stack of books next to him. “Another pair of eyes would help.”
Adam stares at the books, unsure. “I wouldn’t even know what I was looking for. Or at.”
Sam shakes his head. “Just have a read through. If you find any mention of angels or Lucifer or the Apocalypse, let me know, but otherwise, just have a look.”
Adam really doesn’t want to go back to sleep, so he figures he might as well. It’s something potentially practical to do, and the solid proof that Sam actually is thinking about a solution to their big end of the world problem settles something in him just a little.
“A couple of them aren’t in English.”
“You can read,” Adam flips open the cover of the top book, “Latin?”
Sam laughs. “Enough for an exorcism and to know which parts I can skip over.”
“Cool. I took three years of French, though I don’t think much of it stuck.”
Adam puts the book aside then grabs a pile of others. He carries them over to the couch, settling in, and starts to read. He's still there when the sun begins to rise, and a few hours after that when Dean begins to stir.
Almost a week after he was rescued from the warehouse, Adam steps out of the shower to catch the sounds of a hushed argument coming from the other side of the door. He strains to listen as he gets dressed, but it’s not until he virtually has his ear pressed to the wood that he can make out what Sam and Dean are saying.
“Are we really going to have this conversation again?” he hears from Sam. “He’s in, more than we ever thought, and we can’t pretend that there’s an alternative here. That he’s got a choice, or a chance at a normal life.”
“I’m not saying leave him defenceless, I’ve never said that,” Dean snaps back. “I’m saying maybe hold off on timetabling the hunter training. We’ve got bigger things to worry about.”
“All the more reason to start teaching him as soon as possible. Besides, you’re the one that’s already started giving him lessons.”
“I explained a couple of warding sigils because he asked, that’s it. I’m not putting a gun in his hand. Adam’s not a hunter.”
“And the banishing sigil? He asked about that too?”
A pause.
“It was on topic.”
“And I’m saying it’s good that he knows it, that he can use it if he has to. But that’s not going to be enough.”
“Why would we drag him any further into this? You want to train him up, take him out on hunts? Just so he can die bloody and young? Again? We can’t do that to him.”
“How else do you think it’s going to end, Dean? Even if we manage to beat the Apocalypse, there’s no normal life for him anymore. He needs to be able to protect himself. The angels know exactly who he is, and I’d be willing to bet that if they don’t already, then the demons are going to start figuring it out pretty damn quick. Monsters looking for revenge already found him once, and they killed him. Killed his mother.”
“That was different.”
Adam’s pushing open the bathroom door before he really knows what he’s doing. There’s a weird ringing in his ears – “It’s nothing personal, sweetheart. It’s just that, your daddy’s a monster, a murderer, who killed our father. It’s only fair that we kill you too” – and he enjoys the way Sam and Dean literally freeze mid argument, heads both jerking in his direction.
“That’s my life you’re talking about,” he says, leaning against the doorframe. “Do I get a say?”
“No!” they snap at him before flinching, looking back at each other with an uncomfortableness that Adam doesn’t quite get.
He ignores it, frowning at them instead, and his annoyance must come across because they both look at him a little sheepishly
“We want you to be safe, Adam,” Sam says. “The angels, Lucifer, they aren’t the only ones out there who are going to want to hurt you. You need to be able to protect yourself.”
“What happened to you guys looking out for me?”
“Of course we are, we will,” Sam hurries to say. “But whether you’re with us or not, just being who you are means you’re in danger.”
“Doesn’t mean you need to be a hunter though,” Dean cuts in. “You don’t need to get caught up in this nightmare.”
“I already am, and not knowing what was going on is kind of what got me eaten in the first place.”
They both flinch.
“I want to know more. I want to know what’s out there.”
“It’s not the kind of stuff you can un-know,” Dean says. “It’s dangerous, and you’ll spend the rest of your life knowing exactly what’s out there in the dark, knowing exactly how bad it can really get. That kind of shit can drive you crazy. Or worse.”
“Better than only half knowing.” He turns to Sam. “But I don’t want to be a hunter either. I don’t want this.” He waves his hand, encompassing the salt lines and the motel room and the bags of guns and just all of it.
“Adam-”
He cuts Sam off. “Can you honestly say that I’d be safer doing what you do?”
Sam sighs, looking like he wants to argue while knowing that Adam is right, that he can’t honestly say that he’d be safer. It just makes him look kind of sad. Dean, next to him, looks about the same.
“I get that things are different now, I get that the…the life I had is over.”
“You can’t run from this. From this family, from…” Sam shakes his head. “Believe me, I’ve tried, and it ended…”
He looks like he’s about to cry.
“I’m not running, I’m not sticking my head in the sand. I want to know, I want to learn, but I’m not a hunter, and I’m happy for it to stay that way. And I mean, it’s not like we can shoot the Devil with a gun. Can we?” he adds when Sam and Dean grimace at each other.
“No,” Dean says, looking back at him, jaw clenched. “We can’t shoot the Devil.”
“Okay then, so let’s focus on the more pressing issue and what we can do about it. There’s no point in throwing out Plan A if we don’t actually have a Plan B to replace it with. Let me help.”
Sam and Dean look at each other again, and Adam’s kind of starting to hate when they have these silent conversations. But whatever their argument is, Dean must lose, because he rolls his eyes and huffs out a “Fine.”
Sam turns back to him. “We’ve been looking, for months, ever since this started and we found out what the real deal was. We’ve been trying to find a way, trying to find something with the power to kill Lucifer.”
Adam’s tempted to correct him – something else with the power to kill Lucifer – but he bites his tongue. Plan B. They’re looking for a Plan B.
“And it’s not that there’s no lore out there, there’s too much, but we have no idea how much is even close to the realm of accurate. Angels only started appearing on earth in significant numbers last year, and until he was released, most demons thought Lucifer was a fairy tale.”
“It probably doesn’t help that both sides are convinced that Michael and Lucifer are the only ones able to take each other out, and that it’s going to end that way no matter what. They’re probably not going to write down or even look for other options if they think they know what’s going to happen. What would be the point?”
“Yeah, right.” They both look at him oddly, but Sam continues on. “At this point we’re just looking for anything else that might stand a chance against him. And we are looking.”
Adam nods, thinking, eyes flicking back and forth between his brothers. “Lucifer’s current vessel is breaking down, right?”
“Apparently.”
“So, he’s weak, or weaker than he would be if he had a different vessel.”
Sam shifts.
“If we’re going with Plan B, whatever it is, we can’t be wasting time. Not only are people dying, but sooner or later Lucifer is going to jump to someone else, and then we’ll lose the advantage.”
“I’m not going to say yes to Lucifer.” Sam’s fists are clenched by his sides, the set of his face grim, but there’s also a little hurt in his eyes.
“I know that. I didn’t mean you,” Adam hurries to add, even though a small part of him, shamefully, had been thinking it. “But it’s going to be someone, eventually, so we need a plan now, or at least something to buy us time.”
Sam relaxes, though not entirely, and half turns to face his pile of books that are now stacked on one of the chairs. “I’m not giving up.”
“No one’s giving up,” Dean says, staring at the side of Sam’s head for a long moment before looking back at Adam. “We should hit Indiana tomorrow. It’s been almost a week, we can probably start heading straight for Sioux Falls.”
Adam isn’t exactly jumping at the thought of finally returning to the odd, cluttered mess that is Bobby Singer’s house, but it’s bound to be better than being trapped in a car all day. And being in once place, one with even a fraction of the books he’d briefly caught a glimpse of, can only help the planning. He remembers then, something he’d heard on the news earlier.
“Probably a good idea. Weather guy said they’re expecting a big storm to come through.”
“Yeah,” Sam says, still not looking at either of them. “Sounds like a plan.”
The silence following that hangs heavy in the air, broken only when Sam eventually grabs the car keys of the table. He mutters something about getting them dinner, and leaves, still without looking at them.
“He hasn’t been sleeping,” Adam says as he stares at the door Sam just left through, listening to the rumble of the Impala as it drives away.
“Yeah, I know.” Dean turns back to him. “What about you?”
“What about me?”
“Sleeping okay? Beds too hard, pillows too lumpy, nightmares keeping you up, anything like that?”
The look on Dean’s face is far too knowing.
“Nah, sleeping like a log.”
“Right.”
Dean stares at him for a moment longer, long enough that Adam has the urge to shift under the scrutiny, but then he turns away and heads for his bag, pulling out a bottle of whiskey that he immediately takes a drink from. He sits down on the bed, offering the bottle wordlessly to Adam, and shrugging when he declines.
“So, you’ve been arguing about me, you and Sam?”
“Not just you. But yeah, the hunting thing has come up more than once.” He takes another pull. “You know, we had basically the same argument when we found out about you.”
Adam sits down sideways on one of the chairs so that he’s facing Dean, arms wrapped around the back.
“What actually happened?” he asks, because he’s wondered about this. “I mean, the angels told me about you, filled in a few blanks about how I died, but you guys knew about me. How?”
“Last year. Got a call on one of Dad’s old cells, looking for him. It was you, or you know, the ghoul pretending to be you, trying to lure Dad into a trap.”
Adam’s mind immediately jumps back to that day, the day he’d burst into his house, sick with worry, having driven all night, and stopped dead when he’d seen her standing in the kitchen. He’d been so relieved, hadn’t thought, hadn’t noticed, just thrown himself at her, squeezed her tight like his life depended on it. She’d touched his cheek when he’d finally pulled back, apologised for making him worry, and promised to explain everything.
He hadn’t seen what she’d hit him with.
“One of them-” He swallows around the sharp lump in his throat. “It looked like my mum when it was…”
“Yeah. They take on the form of the people they…” Dean trails off and takes another drink.
His own face, with a blood smeared mouth, looking down at him.
“Anyway, we showed up, it told us who you were, spun stories about Dad and a missing mum, and we bought it.”
“And the argument?”
“It offered to help hunt down the monster we thought we were chasing, said it wanted revenge. Sam was on board, wanted it, you, trained up, wanted to let you help. It was probably just playing along to get him to let down his guard.” Dean shrugs. “I guess it was out for revenge itself though, so who knows. Maybe it genuinely believed what it was saying.”
“You didn’t?”
“Dad wanted you kept out of it. He didn’t want this life for you, and I figured we should respect his wishes on that. Plus…you had a chance. You were a bright kid, your whole future ahead of you, this crap didn’t have to be it. You had a chance at a normal life. So yeah, we argued. Didn’t help that we already pissed.”
“At me?”
Dean shakes his head. “Nah. At Dad, at each other, at all of it. Things were a bit of a mess back then.”
“And they aren’t now?”
“Different kind of messy.”
They sit in silence, Adam watching Dean, Dean staring down at the bottle held loosely in his hands.
“John really never mentioned me to you?” Adam eventually asks. “Not once?”
“No, he didn’t. And I’m guessing he didn’t mention us either.”
“No. I didn’t even know he’d been married before. Maybe Mum knew, but if she did, she never told me. All she ever said was that he’d been passing through when they met and that he travelled for work.”
“He said he was a mechanic, right?”
Adam huffs. “Yeah. I guess I never really knew him. I mean, it was only a handful of visits since I was twelve, so how could I? But I really didn’t know him at all, did I?”
Dean takes another drink, barely even wincing before looking back over at him.
“I don’t know. Maybe you got to see bits of him that Sam and I didn’t, or haven’t in a long time. Dad was…complicated. He did what he thought was best for us, and that included you.”
“But?” Adam asks, watching Dean’s face and trying to work out exactly what he’s seeing there.
“Dad should have kept you safe. You and your mum. I get why he didn’t tell you, why he thought it would be safer to keep you both completely out of it, and I don’t know what would have made a difference. But he should have kept you safe. You shouldn’t be on the run from angels, we shouldn’t be arguing over whether it’s safer to train you to hunt monsters or not.”
“The hunting stuff, the ghouls, yeah, that’s on Dad, but I can’t really blame him for the Apocalypse. Might have to take that up with God instead.”
Dean lets out an ugly laugh. “Believe me, we’ve tried.”
Adam waits for the punchline. “For real?” he asks incredulously when it doesn’t come. “God? As in…God?”
“Yeah.”
“You’ve met God?”
“Nope. Which is kind of the problem. I met the only angel that the big guy seems to still talk to, and he said point blank that God knows exactly what’s happening, but that he has no interest in showing up and fixing it. He’s apparently washed his hands of all of it.”
Adam has no clue how to respond to any of that. God exists. Angels, sure, but God feels like something else altogether, even if it does, logically, make complete sense. If angels existed, if the Devil exists, why not God?
The rest of it just sounds like a cruel joke. God is real but he doesn’t give a shit. It’s the Apocalypse, and they’re on their own.
“So,” he says slowly, “it really is up to us then?”
“Pretty much. And like I said, I’m sorry. You deserved better than this, than all of this.”
“And you don’t?”
Dean looks back down at the bottle in his hands. “That ship has long since sailed.”
Adam picks at the paint flaking off his chair as the room descends into heavy silence again. He sneaks repeated glances at Dean, who’s staring down at his feet, jaw clenched, and brow furrowed.
“You could see him, couldn’t you?” Dean asks after a while, still not looking up.
“Who?”
“Michael, back at the warehouse, in that room. You could see him, hear him?”
“Yeah.” Adam swallows, mouth suddenly dry. “Yeah, I could.”
Dean nods, mostly to himself.
“Sam couldn’t. He said it hurt, that he could feel his eyes burning, his eardrums about ready to burst.”
“Why? I mean, we were fine.”
He’d noticed that. While Sam had been curled up in agony, Dean had been moving, dragging them out. He’d looked where Adam had looked, right at Michael.
“Same thing happened to me with Cas before he found a vessel.” Dean stares somewhere to the left of Adam. “He tried talking and all it did was make my ears bleed and shatter every mirror and plate of glass in the area. A woman even got her eyes burned out just by looking at him.”
“How?”
“That’s just how it works. Angels in their true forms aren’t meant to be seen by humans, they’re too much. The only ones who can are a special, chosen few.” The bitterness drips of Dean’s words, but when he finally moves his gaze across to Adam’s face, he doesn’t look angry. “Their vessels.”
It hangs in the air, a weight, a stone around both their necks.
“You can’t trust them.”
The way Dean looks at him has him panicking internally, just a bit.
He knows. Shit, he knows.
“They’ll play dirty, they’ll tell you what you want to hear, they’ll do whatever awful shit they need to in order to get what they want. They don’t care about us, any of us.”
Adam thinks about Michael’s attempts to talk him round, his attempts at persuasion, or rather, his suggestion that Adam convince himself. He thinks about the hand on his shoulder, the closeness, and then the admission that an apology for what happened to him would only be half-meant. He still does appreciate the perceived honesty of it, and maybe that says something about them both, that he feels that way, and that it was even said. Michael could have lied.
He could always be lying. And maybe he is.
“I’m sorry.”
He thinks again about telling Dean about Michael, coming clean about the dreams, about what he’s not not thinking about, what he’s pretty sure Dean suspects him of thinking about.
“Yeah, me too,” is what he says instead.
The library is quiet as Adam wanders through the aisles, his fingers brushing over the spines of the books as he walks past. He’s searching for something, something in particular, but he can’t quite remember what. Looking around he sees psychology books, which doesn’t feel right, so he keeps walking, up and down the aisles. Books on ethics give way to books on religion. Ancient Greek. Judaism and Islam. Buddhism. Christianity.
He rounds a corner to find Michael standing amongst the shelves, paging through a book. Adam freezes, stares, takes in the dark red blazer and matching pants Michael’s wearing. Watches his fingers -his fingers – turn each page carefully, with something almost like reverence. He doesn’t know how long he stands there for, but eventually Michael lifts his head.
“It’s rude to stare,” he says, closing the book.
“I wasn’t,” Adam instinctively retorts as Michael slots the book back into its spot on the shelf. “We’re really going to keep doing this, then? You’re just going to keep showing up in my dreams?”
“How else am I meant to talk to you? Using a phone isn’t exactly an option, and I believe showing up in person would get messy rather quickly.”
“Plus, to do that you would need to know where I was. Which you don’t.”
Michael looks at him for a long moment, the corner of his mouth turned up.
“Of course, I have no idea where you are. But even so, I would think I’d be better company than the alternative. Would you really rather dream of dying than of me?”
No.
“Maybe.”
Michael folds his hands in front of him, and Adam’s briefly distracted by the movement. Are his fingers really that long?
“Have you been thinking things through?”
Adam blinks, looking back up at Michael’s face. “It hasn’t even been a week.”
“We’re on a bit of a tight schedule here. The Apocalypse waits for no man.”
Adam searches his face, for what he’s not sure, but all he gets is carefully constructed neutrality. He takes a deep breath.
“Okay, fine, yes, I’ve been thinking about it. I was ready to say yes before because…because of course I was. It’s Lucifer, it’s the Devil, and he has to be stopped. You taking him out was the only option, you needed a vessel to do it, and half a world is better than no world at all. It was true then, and yes, it’s true now. Saying yes to you still makes sense.”
“I’m sensing a ‘but’ coming.”
“I don’t trust you. I believe that you want, or need me as a vessel, but everything else? After Zachariah, after all the things you did trying to get a yes out of Dean? How can I believe anything you say?”
“I would argue that the lengths we’ve gone to prove how important this is.”
“That’s not the point. How can I trust that you’ll keep your word, that you’ll give a shit about the rest of us down here? Especially if…”
“If what?”
“If there was another way? A way to stop Lucifer without the casualties, without destroying half the planet?”
The neutral façade cracks a little, and Adam can almost feel the flash of annoyance.
“There is no other way.”
“But what if there was?”
“Do you have one?”
“No, but-”
“No, because there aren’t any. This is how it was Written at the beginning, and so, this is how it will be. No escaping it, no fighting it, no weaselling out of it. Even if we wished it otherwise.”
“But if there’s a chance-”
“You say you understand what’s at stake,” Michael cuts him off “but I’m not sure you really do. So here.” Michael reaches out, touching his fingers to Adam’s temple. “Let me show you.”
Screaming.
Blood.
Storms, floods, hail, that destroy everything in their path. Earthquakes that shake entire continents. Towns and cities buried, washed away, burnt to the ground.
Bodies piling up, taken by demons or dumped in mass graves or left to rot.
The sun, in turns, too weak to bring light, and too strong, scorching the earth.
Thousands, millions falling ill, and then turning, becoming something else. Spreading.
A word scrawled again and again. Croatoan.
Bombs dropped.
Stars that aren’t stars falling to earth.
The few humans left, turning on each other. Hiding. Scrambling for survival.
Pleas for help, prayers, unanswered.
Dead. Everyone dead. Dying slowly, horribly.
Sam dressed in a white suit. A shoe, pressing down on Dean’s neck. A crack.
Adam clings white-knuckled to the bookshelf, head hanging impossibly heavy between his hands. His legs are shaking, and he can feel burning acid crawling up his throat. He watches what could be sweat but what might also be a tear drip onto the floor.
Michael is standing next to him, Adam can see the red of his pants from the corner, and the colour is too dark, too much like blood.
But at least Michael isn’t wearing white.
“That is what will happen if Lucifer wins.”
“Fuck you. Fuck you. I didn’t need to see that.”
“I think you did. But if it’s any consolation, you wouldn’t have to live through it, at least not for long.”
Adam turns his head to look at Michael, though it takes a moment for his eyes to focus properly on his face.
“What the hell does that mean?” Adam stands slowly, releasing his crushing grip on the shelf, but keeping a hand out to support himself.
“Lucifer will kill you.”
“How do you know that?”
Michael shrugs. “Because I know him. He will kill you, and he might make it quick, or he might draw it out, but rest assured, he will kill you, and there will be nothing you could do to stop him.”
“Why?”
“For any number of reasons. Because you’re human. Because you’re helping keep Sam from him. Because you’re mine.”
“I’m not yours,” Adam cuts in.
“You are, Adam. You were made for me.”
There’s no possessiveness in Michael’s voice, not like he’d expect to accompany such words, but there’s something there, and he looks at Adam with such focus it makes him feel uncomfortably alight. Though somehow, concerningly, not too uncomfortable.
“You were,” Michael continues in the face of Adam’s shaking head, his confusion. “Not planned, no. Not expected. But still, made for me.”
“I wasn’t.”
“Haven’t you wondered why we brought you back? We could have used Sam as the bait, used him to get Dean to capitulate. Used any number of people. But I thought, I hoped that if I couldn’t get through to Dean, if he truly refused to see, then I’d have you.”
Adam has somehow been turned, backed into the shelf. He puts his hand out, and Michael stops, an arm’s length away. It’s still too close. He feels like he can’t breathe, but he also can’t look away.
“You understand, I know you do. You’re just afraid. But you don’t have to be. If it helps, think of it like this. I am doing you a courtesy, allowing you to be free. I could have angels waiting at Robert Singer’s to pick you up, or have you scooped up off the street. It would be tricky, given how much you’re moving around, but certainly not impossible.”
Adam, chilled, thinks about the eyes he’s felt, the feeling of being watched, followed.
“I could even keep you right here if I wanted to,” Michael continues, and he hasn’t moved, hasn’t taken a step, but he feels closer, like he’s crowding Adam back against the bookshelf. “It wouldn’t be hard. Keep you asleep, keep you here, just the two of us, and we’d have all the time in the world to talk things through.
The horror must be showing on Adam’s face. He pictures Sam and Dean in the morning trying to wake him, not being able to. He pictures being stuck here, trapped in a dream, in his own head, for however long it takes for Michael to get bored. To get angry.
Michael watches him, and Adam can’t tell if he’s pleased that Adam’s so afraid, if he’s mad, if he’s enjoying it, or if he doesn’t care at all. His face is too controlled.
“No.” It comes out softer, weaker than he wants, but it does stir the tiniest bit of something in Michael face, something that Adam can see behind his borrowed eyes. “Please don’t.”
“I don’t want to do that, any of that. And I’m not going to. You say that you can’t trust me? Trust that there are far easier, far less risky ways to do this, and realise that I’m not doing any of them.”
“How is that not a manipulation?”
“Is it manipulation if it’s the truth? Cruel, upsetting? Maybe. But that doesn’t make it a lie.”
“It’s a threat.”
“I don’t think it is. I could hurt you, true, but simply pointing that out doesn’t a threat make. You could hurt others yourself just as easily. But just because you can, doesn’t mean you want to, or will. I simply want you to understand, to believe me when I say that I am being honest with you, that you can take my motivations as they are. I could hurt you, I could force you, and with everything that’s at stake, I would do so with only minimal hesitation.” Michael finally closes the space between them, steps in close, and there’s nowhere for Adam to go. “But I don’t want to. And I’m not going to.”
“How can I believe you?”
Michael’s hand comes up to his shoulder, and his thumb, by accident or design, brushes against the bare skin of his neck.
“Have faith. I am not your enemy, and I am not lying to you. I won’t. I want you to see, I want you to say yes because you want to, because you understand the importance, why it has to end this way.”
He leans in, and Adam’s eyes slip closed. Maybe if he doesn’t look, maybe…
He’s not sure what he wants.
“Do the right thing, Adam. Let me in.”
The “yes” is on the tip of his tongue. Three letters, one syllable, and it would be done. Michael will be able to do what he needs to. The world will be saved. Lucifer will be dead.
Lucifer.
Sam.
I’m not giving up.
No one’s giving up.
“Give us time,” is what comes out instead. “Give us just a little longer to try and find another way.”
He opens his eyes, bracing for anger, for annoyance even, but what he gets is closer to pity.
“Adam-”
“If you’re so sure I’m going to say yes eventually, then what does it matter? If you’re right and it can’t be done, then what do you have to worry about? But if there’s a chance that we can save people, if there’s a chance that there’s another way, that Lucifer can be stopped without the war, without you having to kill him, give us time to find it. Please.”
“And that’s what you want, to save people?”
Adam doesn’t hesitate. “Yes.”
A frown crosses Michael’s face as he stares at Adam, as his gaze drifts down to the side. He’s silent for a long time, and Adam’s heart lodges in his throat.
“I am patient,” Michael eventually says, voice low. “But my patience is not infinite.”
And then an alarm is pulling him from sleep.