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the hands by which we take hold of heaven
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When Dean Winchester is born, the Heavenly chorus sings. The sword has come, the sword has come, can be heard throughout even the mortals’ meager shreds of paradise. For centuries prior the day, angels whisper of its approach.
There is no such fanfare during Adam Milligan’s birth. He is, after all, a simple substitute. Michael relegates its organization and planning to a lesser angel, Zachariah, and says no more than, “You’ve done well,” when Zachariah informs him of his second vessel’s first breath, meticulously arranged to occur on the day of the saints’ feast, his own feast day.
“Cute little thing,” Zachariah says, even after Michael hums a dismissal. “That is, if you’re into squishy, hairless monkeys.” And when Michael doesn’t bother to comment, he ambles off to accomplish his other duties.
Michael doesn’t deign to look in on the child until nigh on a decade later. Two of his three archangel brothers are gone, and his father had absconded soon after Michael cast Lucifer into the cage, all for the sake of humanity. Burdened with the responsibility of manning Heaven all but alone, Michael is feeling bitter and maudlin, and needs a reminder of mankind’s worth.
An eight year old child should, he thinks, be capable of shouldering such a task, especially a child born for him. Some of the more optimistic angels under his charge seem to believe so, finding human children to be bright and precocious souls in spite of their transience. And nineteen year old Dean Winchester has grown into too jaded a man to boost his morale.
Through a slightly smudged window, Michael glimpses Adam for the first time. Small for his age, but possessed of a classically cherubic appearance, the little boy sits at the dining room table, knees folded under him, body bent over an assignment from school with such intent that he has to shut one blue eye and stick out a pink tongue.
There is, a room away, an elderly woman asleep on the couch, paying the boy no heed. Michael takes a moment to hone in on Kate Milligan’s whereabouts, and discovers her bent over her own paperwork at the local emergency room, hollow-eyed, the gilded hair she’d passed onto her son streaked here and there with scarcely perceptible strands of silver.
Although no one but Michael is around to hear him, Adam exclaims, “I’m done,” and pumps his tiny arms victoriously, drawing Michael’s attention back to him.
With painstaking care, the boy gathers up his homework, sticks it into a folder decorated with spacemen stickers, and tucks it into a fire-engine red backpack. Then, abandoning the sleeping woman to her snoring, he runs upstairs to race a battered train set across the spotty tracks lining his colorful bedroom.
Night falls by the time Kate returns. Having eaten a meal reheated by his lethargic neighbor, Adam is sound asleep on his twin bed, diminutive arms wrapped around a careworn teddy bear with a missing button eye. There’s no train set for Kate to trip over, because he’d stowed it away in his toy chest hours ago.
From the doorway, she gazes upon him for a few minutes, then tiptoes through the room to drop a kiss on his plump, freckled cheek, murmuring “I love you, baby” into the silken skin.
She plummets into a cavernous slumber on her own bed soon after, and Michael watches over the Milligans till daybreak, when an anxious Raphael stops by to bid him back. But before he begins his flight, Michael can’t help recovering the bear’s eye with a speck of his grace.
He wants to see how Adam will react, whether he will be frightened or amazed, whether his mother will be too tired to notice the change, but Raphael tells him, in the quiet sort of way that lighting is prone to flash before thunder releases a roar, “We thought you had left, too.”
Something clenches within Michael. He says, “I would never leave you,” and though Raphael doesn’t smile, Michael feels the fleeting touch of his grace brushing his own.
After that, he visits Adam on occasion. Seldom as frequently as he’d like to, because he doesn’t want to fracture Heaven any further with his absence, but visits nonetheless. He would have been content with that forever, content to be a silent sentinel, had Adam not wounded himself two years after that first night, a year after he told his mother there was no need for her to hire babysitters for him anymore.
Now, he stands at the kitchen counter, trembling as he gapes at his injured hand, a bloody cleaver in the sink and his tiny pinky finger nearly severed. Michael curses from afar, before swooping to earth. The Milligans’ kitchenette is soon suffused with holy light.
Hurt momentarily forgotten, Adam stares at Michael’s true form through round blue eyes, awe evident in the slackness of his jaw. When Michael croons in the language of the angels, Adam’s ears do not bleed. He hesitates for only a second, then nods his consent.
Michael seizes him at once, and heals the gash so completely that not even the faintest line of a scar remains. Then, he makes to exit, but deep within him, hears the faint hope in Adam’s voice when he asks, “Will you stay… just for a little while?”
So Michael stays, receding into the darkest depths of Adam’s mind, where he can speak to him while leaving Adam in control of his own faculties. Chattering cheerfully, the boy resumes making his mother’s dinner.
Michael stays until after Adam falls asleep, and so commence visits of a more affable nature. If Kate sometimes notices Adam murmuring to himself, in spite of being too old for an imaginary friend, she’s too supportive a mother to remark on it, and isn’t around very often, anyway.
Adam grows older. With no shortage of human friends drawn to his clever spark, he starts to need Michael less and less. Michael has lived long enough to know that even divinities meet their end, so he lets the boy convince himself he was no more than the imaginings of a lonely child, and Adam moves on.
Once, years later, Adam calls for him. By then, Heaven is busy preparing for the breaking of the seals, and perhaps a weak part of Michael does feel a bit slighted over being ignored, so he resists the urge to go. By the time he senses Adam's death, it’s too late.
“Your boy will be comfortable in Heaven,” Raphael says, because of course he always knew. “If Dean Winchester consents, there will be no reason to inconvenience him with our war.”
“Yes,” agrees Michael, and sets about attempting to earn Dean’s acquiescence more aggressively, but he never does bow to Michael’s will, the same stubborn strength in him that Michael had admired in Adam ages ago.
To say “yes” once is to make yourself vulnerable to it evermore. It is a thing of ease to persuade Adam to trust him yet again. This time, it’s Michael who tries to prove to himself that what they used to have was a mere falsity, because it’s easier to watch Lucifer and the Winchesters destroy Adam – destroy them both – if he does.
He doesn’t quite succeed.
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the end
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