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“I’m sorry, Michael’s what?” Sam asks, even though Adam knows for a fact that he broke the news clearly and precisely.
Adam pulls the phone away from his ear and lets it clunk against the tabletop, hoping this will communicate his dissatisfaction with Sam’s response. He is not being, he knows, completely fair, since Sam’s reaction maps pretty much perfectly onto his own.
Sam’s tinny voice asks, “But how is that even possible?” which is yet another question Adam asked but is now irritated to have to answer. Michael’s explanation was totally unscientific and relied a lot on claims about how fertile his grace has been made by Adam’s love. Adam would really prefer not to say any of it out loud.
“Well,” he says instead, “he is an angel. I guess most things are possible.”
“So he did it on purpose?”
Adam glances at Michael, who looked normal this morning and is now visibly, massively pregnant. “He says he didn’t.”
“I didn’t,” Michael says snippily. “I told you already, Adam; it’s because your unconditional love has made my grace so fertile.”
Sam makes what Adam can only qualify as a squawking noise. “Did Michael just say—“
Adam snatches up the phone and holds it to his ear again as if this will somehow stop Michael, endowed with superpowers and also technically inside of him at all times, from hearing Sam’s laughter. “Yes, and you know it, so shut up before he smites you.”
Sam scoffs. “Michael wouldn’t do that! He likes me now. Right, Michael?”
Michael is too busy cooing at their half-angel, half-human fetus to respond, but it is true, and it drives Adam absolutely nuts. He spent months in the bunker threatening to have Michael smite Sam upon his return. He figured this smiting might happen as retribution for any number of slights ranging from leaving him in the Cage to trying to get him to eat kale, but Michael, after a painstaking resurrection that Adam arranged, decided that Sam was a good influence and a reasonably challenging Monopoly partner, and therefore worth keeping around. It is objectively preferable for them to get along, except that they gang up on Adam about things like eating more vegetables and limiting screentime even though he has an archangel inside him and is completely impervious to all the little ways a human body can malfunction.
Sam doesn’t take the lack of reassurance personally. “Well, congratulations!” He pauses. “This is good news, right?”
It’s a fair question—Adam hasn’t exactly been glowing with pride throughout this conversation, but he still feels a burst of defensiveness at the thought that his baby might not be good news. “Of course it is!” He presses the phone more closely to his ear as if this will somehow make the conversation more private. Michael is still occupied with his stomach. “It was just. Unexpected. Really unexpected.”
“I get that. It can be hard to adjust to new things, and you’ve had a lot of new things to adjust to lately. But I hope you know you’ll be a really good dad. That kid is incredibly lucky.”
Normally Adam would tell Sam to shut up and stop being so sappy, but clearly fatherhood has already softened him, because he just says thank you.
“So, um,” Sam says after fleshing out his speech with a bunch of stuff about how Adam is breaking the cycle of emotionally absent Winchester dads, which, Adam isn’t a Winchester, but whatever, it seems to be really important to Sam to believe Adam is blazing a trail or something. “How does it work? Can I ask that, or is it insensitive? I mean, Michael’s in your body, right? So are you pregnant too?”
“I’m not pregnant. I guess Michael’s carrying the baby in his—grace or something? His projection is showing, but I think he’s doing that for attention, honestly.”
“I am not doing it for attention,” Michael says, still in the soft voice he’s been directing toward his stomach, so that Adam takes a second to recognize it as a response. “Why would I need more attention when I have our little bean with me at all times?”
Adam has no idea what to say to this, so Sam ends up breaking the silence. “Okay. Sure. So if he’s carrying the baby in his grace, I mean—I don’t know what that means, if the whole pregnancy’s happening on another plane of existence. Will the baby need a vessel?”
“I’m not sure. I don’t think this has ever happened before. Or for all we know it happens all the time! Michael’s not really the type of guy who asks questions, so he has basically no practical knowledge about anything. He doesn’t even know where his wings go when they’re not out.”
“I do know,” Michael says. “I’ve just elected not to tell you.”
“Uh-huh.” Adam touches his stomach, which he’s been doing reflexively since Michael told him about the pregnancy, as if he’ll feel the fluttering of a child in his own body. He can’t shake the feeling that it’s unfair for Michael to have something, a part of him, that he can’t access.
“Now are you going to ask him, or are you just going to keep complaining about our little medical marvel?” Michael asks.
“I’m not complaining,” Adam says. “Just pointing out that maybe they wouldn’t be such a marvel if you’d shown a little more intellectual curiosity. Anyway, you’ve called medicine ‘barbaric’ so.”
“It is barbaric! I’m sorry to insult your chosen profession, but cutting people open? Tying them closed?”
“That’s not what stitches—“ Adam shakes his head. “Never mind. Doesn’t matter. Sam, Michael wants you to throw him a baby shower. Apparently he doesn’t trust my party-planning abilities.”
“I did not say that!” Michael protests, even though he basically, absolutely did. “I would like for there to be an element of surprise, and you can’t exactly do that, can you? And, to be fair, that game you suggested with candy bars in diapers sounded repulsive.”
“I didn’t suggest it!” Adam says. “It’s just the only baby shower game I know off the top of my head!”
“That really isn’t better, darling,” Michael says.
“Oh yeah, and I’m sure Sam, who was raised in an all-male environment by an alcoholic drifter, knows so much more about baby showers.”
“Hey,” Sam says mildly. “That’s a little insensitive considering the reason for the all-male environment was my brutally-murdered mother.”
“You can’t play the dead mom card with me, dude; I literally watched my mom be eaten alive.”
Sam laughs. “Burned above my crib, setting off a lifetime of trauma, guilt, and isolation. Then accidentally blown up by my son. I think I win on volume alone.”
“Ugh, whatever.”
Michael finally looks up from his stomach, though he doesn’t stop petting it. “Can we talk about my party now?”
Sam sounds legitimately choked up when he says, “Michael, I would be honored to plan your baby shower.”
“You are the most annoying people I have ever met,” Adam says with feeling. Michael and Sam both ignore him, content to talk around him as they embark on an hour-long conversation about streamers.