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Adam and Sam’s first Thanksgiving together was kind of pitiful. Michael was dead and Dean was dead and Kate was dead, and being raptured apparently made Sam’s girlfriend need space, which Sam told Adam like he was supposed to care, so it was just the two of them and a turkey Adam didn’t know how to cook and Sam didn’t want to eat. Sam made these awful cocktails he learned about from some vegan blogger he’d befriended. As Adam watched him throw kale, ginger, stevia, and gin in a blender, he grabbed himself one of Dean’s possibly-expired beers just to be safe. That turned out to be a good idea, because he couldn’t manage more than one sip of his drink without gagging, although Sam insisted he was enjoying his and actually, horrifyingly, didn’t seem to be faking it.
Their second Thanksgiving is better. They’ve had time to settle into this new thing that isn’t quite brotherhood but can’t be called anything else either. After over a year living together in the bunker, they can talk to each other for up to an hour without stumbling over each other’s trauma and resentment. Michael is back, finally, resurrected by Jack, who is objectively too young and naive to be God, but a less naive God probably wouldn’t have taken Adam’s word for it that Michael could be trusted, so fine. Whatever.
Adam has long since worked up the nerve to visit Kate in Heaven, and although she doesn’t come down for the holiday—time is different up there, and it’s hard to coordinate, and Adam is still uncomfortable with the idea of her seeing this new life he’s made—he feels better knowing he could have her there, if he were just a little braver.
Sam and Eileen have broken up for good, but she still visits the bunker and hugs Sam and ribs him gently in an excruciating display of emotional maturity that Sam seems to want Adam to learn something from, even though Adam’s relationship is fine, thank you very much. No, they haven’t sorted out all the betrayal and pain lurking beneath the surface, and no, he doesn’t think that’s a problem, actually.
Sam and Rowena seem to be back together, but since she’s an ancient Scottish witch who’s basically always fending off Hell coups, she doesn’t actually have the time or inclination to do Thanksgiving with them. A bunch of Sam’s other friends are supposed to come—he’d looked surprised when they sat down to go over the guest list and names kept pouring out of him. Each time he looked to Adam for approval, and each time Adam shrugged. He didn’t have anyone to invite, but it didn’t bother him that Sam had so many, except for a slight pang that wasn’t even worth thinking about. In the end, though, the werewolves and the vampires and whatever else don’t take Thanksgiving off, so the hunters don’t either, and it is, again, just Adam and Sam—and Michael.
“This is stupid,” Michael says with his entire arm inside a monster of a turkey while Adam lounges against the counter eating cranberry sauce out of a can. The little wax paper bag of giblets tore when Michael was wrestling it out, and now he’s convinced its tattered remains are going to set the oven on fire. Adam has no idea how likely that is, but he thinks it’s a pretty low-stakes problem when Michael will be standing guard the whole time with archangel grace and a turkey baster at the ready. He considers flicking a glob of cranberry sauce at the back of Michael’s head, but if his other attempts are any indication, Michael will just go incorporeal and let it splatter against the wall, and someone’s going to have to clean all that up at some point. Adam definitely isn’t going to be that someone—Sam is the older brother who damned him to Hell, and Michael is the life-partner who betrayed his memory to be with a genocidal maniac, so Adam’s basically excused from all chores forever, but he does try not to be inconsiderate.
He contents himself with saying, “I told you that you needed to start thawing the turkey earlier.”
“You did not,” Michael says. He now has zero appendages inside the turkey, but he is squinting into it, occasionally picking the whole thing up and tilting it this way and that. Pink water dribbles out and lands on the floor. Adam notes it and resolutely does not grab a paper towel. “You said, ‘Wow, that thing’s humongous,’ and then you picked it up and tried to do a dance with it, and I ended up having to heal your seven broken toes. But you said nothing about thawing it.”
“Oh.” Adam pokes at his cranberry sauce, which doesn’t taste how he remembers it. Michael got the name-brand stuff. He wiggles his intact toes. “Yeah, I guess I just thought it, then. Couldn’t you just—“ He tries to snap his fingers, but they just slip against each other ineffectually.
“I want you to have a real human Thanksgiving,” Michael says, not for the first time. Not for the first time, Adam says he doesn’t especially care about that. Not for the first time, Michael ignores this and works himself up into a fit about food safety. As far as Adam can tell, all Michael does while he’s asleep is read about salmonella and compare turkey recipes to triangulate the exact right temperature/cooking time combination. When they woke up this morning and the turkey’s ribcage was still frosty and stiff, he nearly cried.
As Adam watches Michael work with an utterly deranged degree of care and precision, he can’t help but think of the year before, when they had to throw out the turkey after he started to carve it—which he didn’t actually know how to do—and found that all the meat more than an inch deep was still pale pink and unnervingly wet. Last year he ate stuffing and green beans because they were the only things he and Sam hadn’t managed to fuck up, and he had an ache in his chest where Michael was supposed to be, and this year he gets to lounge around and pick at the raw pie crusts in the fridge and know that at the end of it he’s going to have an edible meal with someone he loves more than anything and someone who—well, who’s growing on him.
Before he can figure out how to express this, or even if he wants to, Sam pokes his head into the kitchen. He’s jumpy around Michael, and he’s jumpy when Adam’s alone around Michael, so basically he’s jumpy all the time, but he hasn’t told them to get the fuck out of the bunker, which is what Adam would do if two guys were always hanging around reminding him of his trauma. Except that demonstrably isn’t what Adam would do, he guesses.
“Hey, guys,” Sam says. He’s had a Monopoly board set up since six. He and Michael have been locked in a death spiral since six-thirty. Adam has been bankrupt since seven, even with Michael stealing from the bank on his behalf and occasionally slipping him entire properties.
The turkey, unfortunately, has taken an unanticipated amount of attention, and after briefly considering sending Adam as a proxy, Michael instead decided—five entire minutes into the instructions on which Adam was supposed to be taking notes—to put the game on hold. Now he says, testily, “I am aware that it is my turn.”
Sam flinches. Adam notices, and he notices Michael noticing too. Michael makes an unhappy face at the turkey, which he is now, despite the many salmonella warnings, in the process of stuffing.
“That’s not, uh.” Sam seems then to make the conscious choice to not be afraid. Adam never notices that he’s perpetually slouched until he stands up straight. “That’s not what I came in here to say. Although the way some people play it, you’d technically have forfeited by now.” The stuffing makes an unappetizing squelching noise as Michael’s fist clenches around it, enraged as he apparently is by the thought of a forfeit. This time Sam pretends not to notice. “No, I came to see if you needed help.”
Michael goes still like a prey animal. A week after Michael got back, Sam apparently cornered him while Adam was up in Heaven and said Jack had given him a button that would deactivate Michael’s powers, and that he would use it if he had to. Adam doesn’t think the button is real, but Michael believes in it the way he once believed in Chuck, which is to say stupidly.
“I have Adam for help,” Michael says cautiously. He’s no longer stuffing the turkey, but he stays slightly hunched over, keeping its bulk between him and Sam.
“I think we both know Adam isn’t helping,” Sam says, grinning almost convincingly.
“Hey!” Adam tries for an indignant gesture and accidentally throws his spoon with a mouthful of cranberry sauce still on it. Sam dodges easily with his stupid hunter’s reflexes, then looks at Michael, one eyebrow raised as if to say See?
Michael must see, even though he’s supposed to be on Adam’s side in all things, because he nods to Sam and then gestures to the vegetables spread out on the table Adam’s leaning on, which Adam has been ignoring. “You can do the potatoes.”
“He cannot do the potatoes!” Adam says. “He’ll put oat milk in them or something.”
Sam looks between them guiltily, like he was indeed planning on putting oat milk in the potatoes.
Michael looks at Adam, then at Sam, then at the potatoes. He pats the turkey very gently and then turns to the sink and starts to wash his hands, which he does like a surgeon, for what feels like an entire hour. Adam tries to share an exasperated eyeroll with Sam, but an alliance seems to have formed while he wasn’t paying attention, because Sam won’t engage.
When Michael has finally deemed his hands clean enough, he turns his attention to the mountain of potatoes, considering them carefully with his fists on his hips. After several minutes of thought, which Sam watches with either intrigue or fear while Adam plays Candy Crush, Michael separates out about a third of the potatoes. “You can put oat milk in these,” he says firmly. “The others are Adam’s.” Both piles are too large for any human to plausibly eat, but Sam must know without being told that explaining portions to Michael is a lost cause, because he just grabs a peeler and gets to work.