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Adam’s mattress came in a long, thin box that a delivery person left propped up outside the bunker’s walls. Sam had offered to drive him to town to buy one in-person, but the thought of a brightly-lit showroom with an exuberant salesman bearing down on him was too much to take in the days just after his resurrection. Anyway, there had been a thrill in picking something out online and using an app on his new phone to track it as it moved ever closer, and then in watching the mattress unfurl from its box and inflate and solidify over the prescribed forty-eight hours. Modern magic aside, it's an unfortunate fact that Sam's mattress is more comfortable. It was in the bunker when he and Dean found it, and even though it must be decades old, it's plush and firm and doesn’t even smell weird or anything. Adam has been working at a corner of it with his nails, hoping to figure out what’s inside of it or break whatever enchantment makes it so impressive, as he lies on it with his feet kicked up against the wall and watches Sam fold laundry.
“You could help, you know," Sam says, an entire arm disappearing into the basket in his quest for a matching sock.
Adam shrugs as well as he can with his shoulders pressed into the mattress. For a long time, Sam was afraid to even speak to him, let alone scold him. This is better, he guesses. Less tense, at least.
Sam tried to teach Adam about hunting, an effort that was doomed from the start because having his literal stomach torn out has left Adam with a weak metaphorical one. He could just bear to allow Sam to try to teach him to shoot, but while he was standing in the dead grass and aiming at a row of cans, San got a strange, faraway look on his face and admitted only after a lot of prodding that he was remembering his first try at being an older brother, when he’d done the same thing with the creature that had killed Adam. Despite his best efforts, his voice was soft and sad, and it reminded Adam that no one but his mom had ever picked him first, that he had not even been killed or damned because of anything particular to him, and he took six shots and missed the can every time.
Sam could go hunting on his own, obviously, or with any of the heavily-flanneled hunters constantly coming in and out of the bunker, but instead he fills his time with chores and, made bolder by familiarity, bugging Adam about doing chores. He doesn't push that hard though, because he thinks Adam is depressed.
Adam knows he's depressed, but that isn't why he refuses to help out. He was depressed through most of high school, and he had no trouble getting the laundry done then. It's just that he doesn't want to. They aren't a family, no matter how badly Sam wishes they were.
Something lands with a thump on Adam’s stomach. He looks down to see one of the awful, squishy meal replacement bars Sam favors when he's too tired to dig out the juicer.
"I'm not hungry," Adam says, but props himself up on his elbow so he won't choke when he takes a bite, which is when he realizes he is hungry after all. It's funny, considering that he made Michael take him to a diner first thing, how difficult it's been to keep himself fed. He’s out of practice at having a body, and at being the person in charge of it. “This is disgusting," he says after taking another bite. The bar’s wrapper proudly proclaims that it contains two whole egg whites, as if that’s somehow a selling point. A blob of peanut butter-flavored egg white, or however it works, lands on Sam's freshly-laundered sheets. Adam pops it in his mouth before Sam can see, but it leaves a grease spot.
There's a spell on the library door that means Adam can't get in on his own, just because an unspecified number of the books are cursed and he doesn't know how to tell which. It's the kind of thing he would hate Sam for if he had the energy; since he doesn't, they get along okay. And secretly, in a small, guilty, selfish part of himself, he appreciates having an excuse not to spend his every waking hour trying to get Michael back. He misses Michael desperately, in a way he doesn’t think it’s possible to miss someone until you’ve spent a thousand years with them, but it’s nice to be able to get up and stretch and go out in the daylight without needing to spend a half hour justifying it to himself.
He finishes the bar and slides the wrapper between the mattress and the bed frame and says, “That was disgusting. I want chicken nuggets.”
“Come grocery shopping with me next time.”
“No.”
“Well then.” Sam somehow manages to fold a fitted sheet passive-aggressively, and also sloppily. “I think I’m finally going to tackle the kitchen today.”
“Okay? Like I give a shit,” Adam says, though he knows the solitude will start eating at him within a half hour. He stares at the ceiling while Sam leaves the room, holding out as long as he can before drifting out after him.
In the kitchen, Adam pulls himself up onto one of the gleaming metal counters while Sam pours what seems like a dangerous amount of bleach into a bucket.
Adam can feel the energy in the room shift well before Sam says anything. Sam is obsessed with the idea that they’re going to commiserate over their shared trauma, only what he means by that is Adam’s supposed to get weepy and vulnerable and eventually admit that he doesn’t actually want Michael back, and Sam will just sit there being wise and comforting and totally functional like none of it has anything to do with him, like he’s doing Adam a favor, like he doesn’t have the insatiable urge to pick and pick at what happened to them now that he finally has a captive audience.
Adam could leave, should leave, but somehow he can’t force himself to, so he’s still perched on the counter when Sam says, “I get the feeling you haven’t really processed what happened to you,” and slops easily half the bucket of water onto the floor.
Adam makes a show of lifting his feet up into the air even though the spill is nowhere near him. “Have you processed what happened to you?”
“The Cage was a long time ago for me.” The spilled water turns a dingy brown as it spreads across the floor, and Sam looks at it in despair for a moment before trying to push it around with a mop that’s seen better days.
“That’s not an answer.” Adam has to resist the urge to yank the mop out of Sam’s hands, and, more temptingly, to say how obvious it is that Sam was raised in a series of motels by an alcoholic father.
“It gets easier,” Sam says, running the mop over and over a bit of crusted food that is decidedly wet but still isn’t coming up. Easier, Adam notes, is not better. “You remember to eat and sleep. Your body starts feeling like it’s yours again.” He pauses after this, attention focused inward, the way he does when he’s lied without meaning to. After a moment of silence, he decides to press on. “I’m sure it doesn’t feel like it, but you can live without Michael.”
“I know I can,” Adam says, though he doesn’t, because he can’t. “I just don’t want to.” He was thrilled to be back on Earth, and it was nice with Michael around, but this, now, is awful. He’s weak and slow and nauseous all the time; his brain is too quiet, and his body seems always to be lying in wait to ambush him, and everyone he knows is dead or thirty, which might as well be the same thing when he’s still baby-faced with acne. He hasn’t been human in a thousand years, and he has no interest in picking up the habit now.