Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

When Adam felt his soul being snuffed out, he and Michael were in their apartment, surrounded by gauzy curtains and potted plants and wall hangings with stupid sayings. Adam said once that he had the world’s first domesticated archangel, and Michael refused to speak to him for an hour and a half, which was a long time for two people sharing a body. Now, body empty and soul presumably intact, Adam wakes up in a room he doesn’t recognize with his estranged half-brother staring down at him.

“What?” he snaps, like he wasn’t dead thirty seconds ago. The word rasps its way up his sore throat and sends him into a coughing fit. Sam gestures to the bedside table, and when Adam doesn’t take the hint, he darts forward and picks up the glass of water sitting on it. He holds it out, the liquid trembling against its sides. There’s dust on the rim, but Adam drinks deep anyway. When he’s done, he hands it back to Sam, who leans over to set it down and then, stiff and deliberate, sits on the edge of the mattress. He says Adam’s name. They aren’t touching, but his body heat, the way the mattress dips beneath his weight, the slight animal smell of him, it all combines to make Adam feel trapped. The lights are too bright, and his skin prickles with cold, and he wishes Sam and Dean had left him wherever they found him.

“It’s good to see you. We were— It’s been—“ Sam’s hands twist together. They’re long and scarred like Adam’s might be if he had been allowed to live his own life, or to keep his first death. Sam takes a breath, sits up straight, and asks, “Adam, what’s the last thing you remember?”

The last thing Adam remembers is being erased from existence, and before that, trying to talk Michael into getting a cat. He’d been close, then threatened to name the cat Mikey and ruined the whole thing.

“I know I was dead. You can stop trying to break it to me gently." Then, because it seems like the polite thing to do, he adds, “Thanks for bringing me back this time.”

“That’s true, you were dead. But Adam…” Every time Sam moves, the mattress shifts uneasily. “That was months ago. Jack resurrected you with everyone else, but you just didn’t wake up. It was like something in you didn’t come back.”

Adam decides not to examine this too closely. Months could mean anything, could mean two, could mean another year stolen from him. “Well, something in me didn’t come back. Michael’s dead, right?” He must be. Adam is alive, so it follows that Michael’s father is not. With his loyalties undivided, he would be here.

“I meant—“ Sam stops before he can try to draw a distinction between Adam and Michael that no longer exists. “Well. Okay. You’ve been lying here for months. We thought— I thought you might never wake up.” There’s no reason this should matter so much to him, but the way his voice cracks, it must.

Adam’s eyes burn. He looks away. “Can you turn down the fucking lights?”

Sam scrambles to his feet, and a second later, the overhead light goes out. The dark is better, except that Adam’s taken by surprise when the mattress dips again and Sam is warm and solid beside him.

“I should have realized your eyes would be sensitive. I’m sorry.” Sam squeezes Adam’s shoulder. Even through the shirt Adam remembers dying in, the touch burns, a single spot of heat that he has to fight not to lean into.

He turns his attention to his body, cold and stiff but unmarred. “No bedsores.” He twists his arms so that his hands turn palm-up, then palm-down. “No IVs either.” As his eyes adjust, he can see movement in the dark, but it takes him a moment to identify this movement as himself.

“Jack said you have some of Michael’s grace left in you,” Sam says. Adam’s heart skips a beat. It’s strange to be able to feel his heart, loud and dynamic. Sam continues like it’s nothing, “It was keeping you alive, so we didn’t want to mess with it, but now that you’re awake, well. There are people who would hurt you to get their hands on it.”

“But it’s mine,” Adam says, startled by the panic he feels. He doesn’t feel like there’s any grace left in him. Containing Michael was like being burned alive, unspeakable power raging through his body and leaving ashes in its wake, but there’s no Michael now, and the cold bites at his skin. “I don’t care if it’s dangerous. It’s mine.”

“I didn’t mean to upset you,” Sam says. His hand is still touching Adam’s shoulder, like he’s forgotten it there. Adam allows himself a moment longer, then shakes it off. The cold reclaims the point of contact right away. He feels a trembling, but it must be internal; if he were shivering as badly as he feels like he is, he’s certain Sam would say something. They sit in miserable silence until Sam says, “It’s really good to see you awake, Adam.”

“Always nice to not be in a coma. I guess you and Dean will be happy to give up the bedside vigil. Have you been taking turns? Or did I just happen to wake up while you were in here changing a lightbulb?”

“Ah, well.” The mattress creaks. “Adam… Dean died on a hunt. Months ago. It’s, uh, it’s just you and me.”

“Oh,” Adam says. Sam seems to expect him to feel something, so he tries for sympathy. “I’m sorry.” There’s no room in him for extra grief, but he does his best to mold his voice into something appropriately somber; he doesn’t want to be cruel.

“Thank you.” The mattress shifts again. “I’ve actually— I started coming in here to read a while back. It gets lonely down here. I hope that’s not weird.”

“I think we both know it’s weird as fuck, but whatever.” Adam wraps his arms around himself, startled by the give of his skin under his fingertips. It was dark in the Cage before Michael took an interest in him. He heard the angels battling, heard Sam screaming and begging, but he saw nothing. His body itches with the way Sam’s voice comes at him out of the shadows.

“Can you—“ He feels stupid, childish. Michael promised him, when they climbed out of the Cage, that he would never have to be afraid again. “Could you get the light, actually?”

Sam obliges with the same clattering speed as before, and this time it’s enough for Adam to shut his eyes until he’s adjusted to the way the light bleeds through his eyelids. He has the urge to apologize, but he isn’t sorry, just embarrassed. He thinks Sam’s hand might land back on his shoulder. He hears the creak of a chair.

“How are you feeling?” Sam asks, voice soft and edgeless.

“How do you think? Don’t ask stupid questions.” Adam is annoyed enough to open his eyes. The light is just bearable. Sam is still watching him.

“I think you’re probably feeling unsteady. Confused. Scared. And—“ Sam hesitates. “I know you must be grieving.”

Adam’s hands twist in the blanket covering his legs. Now that Sam’s moved, he could tug it up to his chin like he wants to, but he doesn’t, in case it doesn’t make him any warmer. “That was obviously a rhetorical question.”

“I know. But I want you to know you can talk to me. I get that you probably don’t want to. But if you ever do—“

“I don’t,” Adam says flatly. “I won’t.”

“Right.” Sam smiles, lips pressed tight together. “I understand that. I’m just saying—“

“Sure. Whatever.” Adam looks away. There should be a scar on his upper arm, on the fleshy underside that never saw the sun even before he spent months comatose in an underground bunker. He made the cut, despite Michael’s protests, because all his others were gone, left on his original body as it burned in a clearing somewhere. He’d thought about making more, but the pain had dulled in comparison to the oddly pleasurable sensation of being possessed, and Michael had kept the blood from spilling, so he didn't feel anymore in control of his body after than he had before. He rolls up his sleeve now, with Sam’s gaze on him, and sees nothing but smooth, unbroken skin. He shuts his eyes, head spinning, and when he opens them, Sam’s hands are on his shoulders, Sam’s face very close to his. There are lines around his eyes that don’t match Adam’s decade-old mental picture of him. Adam brushes him off. His touch didn’t burn this time; it felt like nothing, as cold and lifeless as the rest of the room.

“You looked like you were going to pass out again,” Sam says. He settles down on the mattress, close enough that the flannel sleeve of his shirt brushes against Adam’s arm.

Sam claims they're family; it didn’t mean much for all those years Adam was in the Cage, but now Dean is gone, and Adam is what Sam has.

“I’m fine,” Adam says. He shoves the blanket to the foot of the bed and finds he isn’t any colder for it. He’s still in the jeans he was wearing when he died. He picked them because they had a soft inner lining, the green of Michael’s newly-discovered favorite color, but now they feel rough against his skin. “Are you going to offer me a tour or am I just supposed to lie here forever?”

Sam scrambles to comply, on his feet and talking before Adam can even begin the process of reacclimating himself with his long-dormant muscles.

Adam wasn’t as upset as Michael about being imprisoned in the bunker, but he finds that he resents being led down the same halls he once walked cuffed. Besides, though he doesn’t want to have any sort of human feeling for Sam, it’s depressing to think of him living here alone, mourning one brother while watching the other lie comatose.

“What happened to Michael?” Adam asks while Sam is trying to show him the kitchen and all the food he should feel free to help himself to, seriously. It hurts to ask, to admit that he doesn’t know. Michael was a part of him for so long, and now he’s gone, a memory out of reach.

Sam tells the story awkwardly. He tucks his hair behind his ears, rubs the back of his neck, shrugs his hunched shoulders. He’s afraid, Adam realizes watching him. He had a special fear of Michael, but it didn't die with him. Adam wonders if it’s just the long echo of the Cage, or if there’s something more.

Sam doesn’t try to talk around the mutual betrayal, doesn’t hide that he and Dean planned for Michael’s death. Adam is too tired to be angry, so he decides to respect his honesty. They were fighting a war with God, and Michael was an untrustworthy ally.

“I know you and Michael—“ Sam pauses, apparently trying to decide what exactly he knows about Adam and Michael. “I know you got along,” is what he settles on.

Adam laughs. He sounds normal, he thinks, but Sam flinches. He doesn’t want to think about Michael, who loved his father so desperately and got nothing in return. They had been prepared, more or less, to die, but they had thought they would get to do it together.

“I’m sorry,” Sam says, sounding like it costs him, “for your loss.”

Adam laughs again. “We both know you’re glad he’s dead.”

Sam is quiet for a long time. They’re still walking, but he’s given up on pointing out features of the bunker. “I think he was dangerous,” he says finally. “The world is probably safer without him. But whatever he meant to you— I’m sorry you lost it.”

“That's really heartwarming. Means a lot." Adam bites his lip until he can taste blood. "Is there an afterlife for angels, or do they just—stop?”

This, somehow, is what makes Sam freeze. He turns back to look at Adam, and the expression on his face is tired and miserable. “It’s not a good idea to try to bring him back, Adam.”

“That’s not what I asked,” Adam says, voice carefully blank. “I just wanted to know. He’s not back in the Cage, is he?”

Sam tells him about the Empty, placing careful emphasis on its risk, its anger, its inaccessibility to humans. Then he offers to show Adam the laundry room, as if there’s any possibility of continuing the tour.

Adam excuses himself to go back to the room he supposes is his, refusing Sam’s offered help. Sam points him in the right direction anyway, the opposite of the one he would have chosen. He  pauses in the doorway, hand on the light switch. He flicks the light on, then off, then back on again. He may have just woken up from a coma, but he doesn't feel particularly rested. The dark, though, just makes him feel colder. He lies down on the bed, a small thing, nothing like the luxurious king-sized number he had Michael create for the home he’ll never see again. He tries to remember what it was like to be comatose. Quiet, he guesses, but he can’t remember anything. If he dreamt, his subconscious has left no trace of it.

He must fall asleep because he wakes up, mouth dry and sour, eyes burning. He remembers that from his first life, sleeping with his lids half-open, the whites of his eyes burnt red. He’s still cold, but he’s starting to get used to it. He's found, over the years, that it’s possible to get used to almost anything. When he opens his bedroom door, still wearing the clothes he woke up in, he finds Sam leaning against the tiled wall of the hallway, trying and failing to look casual.

"Hey, Adam." Sam straightens up upon seeing him. His hands seek out his pockets then flop free again. "I know I gave you sort of a tour yesterday, but I wanted to make sure you found the kitchen all right. If you're hungry, I mean.”

Adam feels and does his best to discard a pathetic gratitude. He trailed along after Sam yesterday, but in the harsh, artificial light of what he’s assuming is day, he finds that he's retained even less than he expected to. There's something else, too, that desperate need to not be alone. When he was human, he was good at solitude. He hated it, of course, was always trying to convince Kristen to stay the night, a concept her parents objected to well before they got together, but he was capable of it, accustomed to it. Now, though, the long minutes between waking up and talking himself out of bed left him feeling twitchy and unmoored. He doesn't say any of this to Sam, of course. He just rolls his eyes and nods, allowing Sam to lead him to the kitchen.

It's a slickly industrial yet dated room that he does remember having been in before. Sam drums his fingers against the metal countertops. He's smiling through his discomfort. “I don't know if I have anything you'll like. I could make you a smoothie. Eggs, maybe,” he says.

"I can cook for myself,” Adam snaps, even though it isn't particularly true. He had three or four meals he could reliably make back in his first life, and of those he remembers little. When he wanted to eat during the honeymoon period between the Cage and his most recent death, he and Michael mostly went to restaurants. He just doesn’t want to need Sam, not if he can help it.

“Eggs," he says when it becomes undeniable that Sam isn't going to snap back at him or move away from the stove. He's just frozen across the room, except for his fingers still tapping away. He doesn't look exactly frightened—Adam thinks. It's difficult, he's discovering, for him to read human expressions. He's used to seeing emotions filtered through Michael's unusual perspective, then mirrored back to him from his own face. So he's only mostly sure this isn't fear, but something adjacent to it. "Scrambled?"

Sam grins. This, Adam’s fairly confident, is relief. "I can do that. Coffee too?" Coffee isn’t something Adam was in the habit of drinking during his first life—he’s almost certain—but he nods anyway.

Twenty minutes later, he’s sitting across from Sam, treasuring the heat radiating from his mug. The eggs are rubbery, but even this is novel and slightly appealing. Michael did his best to pull back so that Adam could experience humanity when he wanted to, but his senses were still slightly dulled, and there's a thrill now in taking a bite and having his taste buds assure him that no, he definitely does not like this. He doesn’t know how to tell whether the coffee is any good, but he's enjoying it, sharp and hot and bitter. Sam picks at his eggs, which look wetter than Adam’s but not any more appetizing.

“I hope you’ll consider staying a while,” Sam says to his plate. “But I understand if you don't want to. You deserve to have a choice in your life from now on. If you need anything—cash, phone, IDs—just let me know.”

"I have money,” Adam says, reaching into his jacket to check for his wallet. He found it hanging on the back of his door, still holding everything he’d had on him when he died. The calm that follows the movement tells him it’s going to become a compulsion. "I used to have an archangel on my side, you know.”

"Right." Sam, who has managed maybe a cumulative minute of eye contact since Adam woke up, looks up and then away again. “That’s good. That you have, uh. I guess you probably have a place to stay too.” Adam bears down on a particularly large hunk of egg until it comes apart. "A car then,” Sam says. “I could get you a car.”

“Maybe.” Adam already knows he won't leave, but he has no idea how to say this, especially because Sam will take it to mean something, that there is some bit of brotherhood to be salvaged, when it all it really means is that the one thing Adam needs is the one thing Michael couldn't leave him with. He pushes his plate away. The eggs are sitting oddly in his stomach. "Actually, my phone isn’t— I guess I wasn’t in the habit of carrying it.”

Sam seems thrilled to have something to do, or maybe just to have an excuse not to eat his own awful cooking, because he jumps up and leaves the room, returning with a large wooden box that turns out to be full of cellphones. Adam recognizes most of them as absurdly out of date, but there are a few of the sleek kind he had Michael imitate for him. Sam picks out one of these and fiddles with it, taking a few tries to figure out which button turns it on.

“You can never have too many options in our line of work. We never got around to using that one though.” He hands the phone to Adam and steps back, out of his space. “I can give you my number. You don’t have to use it, obviously, but if you need anything—“

Adam looks down at the empty home screen of the phone that is the first possession of his new life. If he adds Sam’s number, it will be the only one he has. Without looking up, he says, “I don’t have to leave. Right away. I mean, my plants are already dead, right?”

— — —

Sam is planning a hunt. Now that you’re awake, he keeps saying in this mournful tone that makes Adam feel kind of guilty for not still being in a coma. He offered to teach Adam to shoot, then got a strange look on his face and never brought it up again. Adam didn’t push because he doesn’t want to go, and he knows how to use a gun anyway, kind of. John took him to an overgrown field for one of his birthdays and taught him to shoot cans and drink beers. He brought Adam back late and drunk, which didn’t actually matter since Kate was still at work when he stumbled in. Ever the loyal son, he told her about it the next day, and she called John and chewed him out. John didn’t show up the next year, just left a voicemail in which his intoxication shone through the three gruff sentences. The year after that he stopped picking up the phone, so that was, Adam guesses, the last time he saw his father. A lot of his memories are missing, things he thinks must have been important to him once, but he rehashed this one for Michael in the Cage, so he has the basics of it even if it does feel dull and picked over. Michael, who only ever had one parent to defer to, couldn’t make up his mind who to side with, whether he thought it was more wrong of Kate to keep Adam from his father or John to contest Kate’s authority. Adam, who discovered he had been telling the story out of a half-buried resentment toward his mother, defended her out of habit.

“Are you sure you’ll be okay?” Sam asks, not for the first time. Adam’s phone has more than one number in it now, full of people he can call if Sam doesn’t come back.

“Why wouldn’t I be?” It’s a stupid thing to say. Adam has rebuffed all of Sam’s brotherly overtures, refuses to attend yoga classes or go to the farmers’ market three towns over while remaining glued to his side in a way that means Sam can’t do those things either.

Sam smiles unconvincingly. “I guess it’ll be nice to have the bunker to yourself, huh?”

Adam grunts and pretends to be absorbed in the phone he still doesn’t totally understand.

“I should head out while it’s still light. There are a couple pizzas in the freezer if you get hungry. And uh, half a cauliflower I didn’t get the chance to roast if you’re feeling ambitious.”

Adam lines up five sparkly candies in a row and his phone erupts in a cacophony of celebratory noises.

Sam smiles for real in a way that has Adam bracing for a shoulder punch or one of the other forced displays of brotherhood he pulls out of nowhere. The last time he tried that, the physical contact reminded Adam of how relentlessly human he was and sent him spiraling into a vicious panic attack, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that he doesn’t try it again.

Adam waits until Sam is in the car, guns and knives and holy water in the trunk, key in the ignition, then hears himself say, “I can’t, uh. I don’t think I can be alone.” The sun burns his eyes. He remembers being resurrected, clawing his way out of the grave into a world he didn’t belong in anymore.

Sam turns the car off. He’s wearing the same soft, concerned face he always has on around Adam, the one that makes Adam want to hit him.

“I mean, I haven’t been alone since—“ Since I died, he wants to say, but that isn’t true. There was a span of time in the Cage, right at the beginning, when Michael left him by himself in the dark. He doesn’t know how long it was. Michael would know, but by the time he might have asked, by the time Michael might have answered, their relationship was too important to risk. Sometimes, when Adam closes his eyes, he’s back in that cold, dark hole.

He thinks Sam might remind him that he’s invited or that it’s only going to be a day, two tops, but instead he just pulls the key from the ignition, pockets it, and unfolds his body from the car.

Adam helps carry the supplies back to the bunker, even though he stood and watched Sam make trip after trip not even ten minutes ago. He can feel the strain in his muscles, soft with inactivity. A lot goes into hunting, apparently, but Sam doesn’t complain. Once they’re back in the library, he makes a couple calls that Adam doesn’t bother trying to hear from across the table.

He doesn’t feel hunger anymore, and until he collapsed in the middle of one of the bunker’s halls, they’d thought it was perhaps a farewell gift from Michael, the vestiges of his grace leaving Adam sturdier than the average human. After that speculation was proven wrong, Sam started bringing cases of meal replacement shakes back with the rest of the groceries. There are bottles strewn throughout the bunker now, most unopened, a few half-consumed and left behind.

Adam grabs one now, forces himself to take a few swallows, and leaves it uncapped on the table. “Sorry you didn’t get to go kill shit,” he mumbles, staring down at his phone and the nothing on its screen.

“You don’t need to apologize. I’m really glad you told me. I know it can’t have been easy.”

“We don’t need to talk about it.” This is a victory for Sam, and Adam hates him for it. Now he knows what Adam has known all along. There’s no longer any plausible deniability, nowhere for him to hide. He’s here because he can’t cope with life alone.

“Okay,” Sam says gently, and Adam hates him for this too.

After an hour of attempts at conversation met by resentful silences, Sam announces that he’s going to the kitchen and looks stricken when Adam doesn’t move. Adam waves him off, but he lingers in the doorway.

It isn’t fair to be annoyed so Adam tries earnestly not to be. He leans back in his chair, eyes trained on the ceiling, but he can still feel Sam’s skittish gaze on him.

“I only meant— Not for that long. I’m not gonna go to pieces the second you leave the room.” He listens for footsteps, and when they don’t come, he rolls his eyes, knowing again that he isn’t being fair.

Sometimes when he was little, Kate didn’t go to work and she didn’t send him to school, and when he went into her room and found her lying in the dark, she pulled him in next to her and pressed her lips to the top of his head. She cried sometimes. Adam doesn’t remember being afraid, but he knows now that this doesn’t mean anything. She smelled like sweat and what he figured out much later was alcohol. She was always fine the next day, and they never talked about it. He wants to find some comfort in the fact that he comes by this misery naturally.

“And I won’t like. Slit my fucking wrists. Okay?”

Silence, long and heavy. Then Sam’s voice, still just slightly too loud, “I’m just going to be in the kitchen if you need anything.”

The room feels too big once Adam’s the only one in it, but then Sam starts making noise in the kitchen, banging pots and pans. Adam considers getting up just to tell him to fuck off, but he leans back in his chair and listens instead.

— — —

“So I guess Michael was like.” Adam crosses his arms over his chest as he stands in the doorway of Sam’s bedroom. He figured bringing a blanket would tip this irretrievably into kid-whining-about-a-nightmare territory, but they do live in an underground bunker with a 1950s HVAC system, and he did get used to having an archangel as his own personal space heater, so he hasn’t felt warm in weeks. “I thought I was just coping weirdly well with having been eaten alive, but it turns out Michael was numbing the memory or something, I don’t know. And now—”

Sam sets his book down on the mattress beside him and takes off his reading glasses, tucking them into the collar of his T-shirt. “And now Michael isn’t here.”

Adam does finger guns, is embarrassed by having done finger guns, and decides to lean into it. “Bingo. Turns out being dragged underneath your childhood bed and eaten alive on spring break leaves some, let’s say, psychic echoes.”The problem isn’t even the nightmares, though there are nightmares. The problem is that he shuts his eyes and remembers the sensation of cold hands on his ankles, inhumanly strong, or he remembers the chill of the Cage, the silence sometimes broken by the sound of Sam’s screams. The problem is that he’s so afraid, and so tired, and so alone.

Sam looks stricken, which isn’t new; every time Adam admits to having any kind of feeling, Sam reacts like he’s personally responsible for it.

Adam starts talking before Sam can try to get him to open up about his trauma again. “Yeah, so. Do you want to watch a movie or something?”

It’s three in the morning and Sam’s booklight is still on, illuminating a circle of comforter, but he says, “Of course.”

One of the bedrooms has been set up like a den, with a plush couch and what Adam thinks is a decent TV. He settles himself across all three couch cushions so that Sam will know he’s not welcome. Sam fiddles with his laptop and the TV for a few minutes, occasionally prompting Adam to suggest a movie before giving up and putting on a documentary about freshwater fish.

Adam, who loved science in his first life but can no longer recall what that felt like, says, “Seriously?”

This, inexplicably, is the moment Sam chooses to stand his ground, refusing Adam something for the first time since he woke up. “Give it a chance,” he says with a grin. He still has his book as he settles into an armchair a safe distance away, but he doesn’t open it.

The film is nice at first. The narrator’s voice is low and steady, and there are a lot of shots of moving water, and it doesn’t really matter that Adam isn’t catching most of the words because he isn’t trying to. But then an image flashes onscreen that he thinks he recognizes, the banks of the lake just outside the Windom town limits. It’s irrational; most of his old life has faded, and there’s no reason this, of all things, would have stuck. Still, something about the image strikes a chord, and he leans in, listening for confirmation, but the smooth rumble of narration doesn’t resolve back into coherent speech.

He digs his nails into the meat of his shoulder until the world around him stops blurring and the words settle into their proper rhythm. When he comes back to himself, Sam is watching. The narrator has moved on without them.

“Can we just watch the movie?” Adam manages, voice nearly steady. “Without you saying anything about trauma or the past or, God, talking about it?” He gestures to the screen. “I’ve always been interested in the reproductive habits of the three-spined stickleback, actually. I’d hate to miss anything.”

Sam’s mouth opens, closes, opens again. His hand is tight around the spine of his book. “It is really interesting,” he says finally, so gently there’s no mistaking it for anything but an act of charity. "Do you want me to rewind some?" Adam hates them both so much he can't speak, but at his nod, Sam starts the movie over and finally looks away.

Chapter Text

The air feels wet against Adam’s skin, though it isn’t raining. He can’t decide whether this would be remarkable to someone who’s spent the last ten years on Earth, so he doesn’t mention it. Sam’s probably too far away to hear him anyway, on the far side of the field of dead grass behind the bunker. He would have to yell, to shatter the quiet of this first moment back in the world, so he watches the sky instead. He remembers learning the names of the clouds in school, but not what they are. For a while in the Cage, he wanted Michael to tell him everything, begged to learn the history of the world, but after a while he stopped worrying about it, figuring Michael would always be there to answer his questions.

Sam calls across the space between them, “It might be nice to plant a garden out here. What do you think?” Adam doesn’t think anything about this and doesn’t bother responding, so Sam tries again. “Do you want to try driving?” He’s standing between two cars, a small purple cube and a black behemoth that tugs at something buried in Adam’s brain.

He feels a spark of excitement he has to focus to chase down. Driving was the first thing he was ever really, truly bad at, and the memory of passing the test on his fourth try is waiting for him in the back of his mind, fresh and undisturbed. His mom took him out for lunch and handed him the keys he’d only just relinquished, now with a ribbon trailing limply from the metal ring. He clipped their neighbor’s mailbox on the drive home, and she took the keys back until it was time for him to leave for college.

Once he’s behind the wheel, the procedural knowledge clicks into place with something less than the security of the license memory. He rolls his window down, ignoring the chill that works its way through all four of the flannel shirts he’s draped himself in. He can feel Sam’s shoulders a few inches from his, can smell Sam’s strawberry-scented shampoo.  His own hair has gone too long between washings. Sam thinks he’s depressed, but that isn’t the problem; the problem is that he doesn’t like being reminded that he has a body and he’s the only one in it.

Sam says, “If you’re not comfortable driving, you don’t have to. For me it kind of renewed this—this sense of agency I’d been missing, but I totally understand if it’s too much."

“Oh, Jesus. I’m fine.” Adam turns the key in the ignition. There were no cars in the Cage, except once, when he wanted Michael to experience the specific personal thrill of the drive-in: the speaker hooked to the side, the snacks brought from home, the blanket spread out in back. It made him feel almost human, but he never thought to drive while he was there. Michael could snap them from place to place, and anyway, there were in actuality no places, was in actuality no there.

“This would be a good spot to get a little practice,” Sam says. “You know, take some time getting reacclimated.”

Adam rests his foot on the gas. The car lurches forward, and there’s a moment when he forgets where he is, forgets what his body’s doing, but then the seatbelt tightens against his chest and he’s solid again. He eases up on the pedal, and their path smooths out. 

The bunker opens onto an actual road, but in the back is a dirt path Sam and Dean beat into submission over the years, and that’s simple enough. The road it eventually connects to is wide-open and empty, and that’s simple too, the kind of backroad Adam grew up on, the kind it’s possible to take without ever seeing another person. It’s only when they get close to the rest of the world that he starts to come apart.

“You’re doing really well,” Sam says when they stop at a red light and don’t start again.

Adam’s hands are tight on the wheel. His breath is tight in his chest. He could die, he realizes, in this ridiculous little car. For the third time, he could die, and no one would bring him back and none of it would matter. He spent his years in the Cage nestled inside Michael’s best approximation of a human life, safe and small and just for him. Even after they escaped, he could ignore the vastness of the world, sheltered by Michael’s grace and the unavoidable fact of God on the warpath. All of his choices were short-term, an interlude before his next destruction. This, now, is permanent.

“Don’t talk to me like I’m a fucking kid,” he says, and waits out a second green light.

“It’s your first time leaving the bunker since you woke up. Cut yourself some slack.” When Adam looks over, Sam’s watching the light fade out. His mouth turns down. “We can wait here as long as you want. Or I can take over, if you’d prefer. I’ve always liked driving, but I didn’t get to do all that much of it, uh, before. Just not how things were.” He laughs. It sounds startlingly insincere, even for him.

Adam adjusts his grip. “Dude, it’s a trip to a farmers’ market. I don’t need a pep talk.”

“Okay, okay, I’ll shut up. Just take your time.”

The farmer’s market was Sam’s single treasured indulgence during the coma, but he’s only been once since Adam woke up. When he made the hour-long drive on his own, he returned beaming, loaded down with New Yorker bags of fresh kale and scallions the length of his arm. Adam was in the library listening for footsteps, willing the letters in his book to hold still. He’d thought he’d reacted normally, but Sam has limited himself to the local supermarket since, so he must have given something away.

Sam hasn’t complained, but he keeps saying they could both stand to get out more, the both uttered carefully as if that's enough to keep it from feeling pointed. He wants them to get more in touch with nature. He wants them to learn to cook together. He wants Adam to meet this nice older guy who makes his own jam and gives away as much as he sells. Adam doesn’t want any of this, but since he’s pretty sure he’s forgotten how to want anything, he’s allowed himself to be loaded into the car just like the cooler in the trunk.

Sam needs to believe there’s still something out there for them, that he has a normal life waiting for him. Adam never really believed this, even when he was making Michael pull an ID and a house and wads of cash out of thin air. He planned for it, but he didn’t think it was real, the possibility of existing as himself again.

They switch seats. Adam leans his head against the passenger-side window, the chill settling beneath his skin.

”It’s good to know your limits,” Sam says. He rolls his window up against the cold, then glances at Adam and rolls it back down. Adam feels a rush of gratitude and hates them both for it. “That’s something to be proud of.”

Adam tugs the sleeves of his outermost flannel down over his hands. The jacket he died in was too dirty to wear today even by his new undead standards. Sam offered to throw it in the wash and wait for it to dry, an offer he wanted badly to accept. The jacket, his jacket, Michael’s jacket, is one of the only things he has left of his old life. Everything else he owns is really Sam’s, lent to him out of pity or guilt.

Sam is a careful driver. Adam watches, wanting a reason to pick at him, but he uses his turn signal and stays carefully at the speed limit and obeys every stop sign and red light. He asks Adam to pick some music and doesn’t complain when he switches from one staticky station to another, enjoying the feel of the dial between his fingers. He leaves it tuned to conservative talk radio for a second just to see if there’s a limit to what he can get away with. There doesn’t seem to be, so he turns the whole thing off.

When they finally make it to the farmers’ market, the parking lot is full. Adam doesn’t immediately connect the crush of cars with the inevitable crush of bodies inside, but when he does, he looks over to see that Sam has beaten him to the obvious conclusion.

“It’s always deserted this late in the day,” he says, nearly pleading. “There must be some kind of event going on.” He pulls off to the side; the truck that’s been tailgating them for the last two miles starts prowling the lot. “We can just head back. It’s not a big deal.” He delivers this last bit convincingly, as if talking organic produce isn’t the single potential joy of his life. Just past the packed lot, a canopy stretches over a throng of bodies Adam can’t possibly make his way through, not when Sam touching his shoulder the other day left him dry-heaving.

Still, he says, “It’s fine. Let’s just go in.”

“We don't have to. And if you want to take a minute, maybe talk about it—”

“Do you want to talk about what it was like for you after the Cage?” Adam asks, because he knows Sam doesn’t. It’s nice that they have the same worst thing; it means neither of them can bear to really sit with it.

Sam goes stiff and gets out of the car, but instead of moving forward toward the market and his cloth-bagged people, he doubles back to the trunk, then approaches Adam’s window with an apple and a meal replacement shake.

“I’m going to leave the keys with you. Don’t ditch me, okay?” He laughs even though he must know it’s a real possibility, or would be if Adam could trust himself.

He waits until Sam is out of sight, swallowed up by the mob, then leans forward until his head is between his knees. The position tugs at something in his back. Sam has been prodding him to take up yoga, which he absolutely will not be doing, but he’s getting the sense that he needs to do something before his body seizes up into one immovable piece.

He presses the bottle to his forehead and lets the cold damp of it merge with the chill running through the rest of him. He didn’t have breakfast today. It should be easy to remember to eat because Sam, who keeps to a rigid nutritional schedule, is rarely out of his sight for more than a half hour at a time, but while Sam had yogurt and granola, he picked the toppings off a slice of pizza that had been sitting in the fridge for a week, rolling the gummy mushrooms between his fingers then pressing them into his napkin. He was thrilled about food when he and Michael got out of the Cage, but that was when he didn’t need it. Being possessed froze the complicated inner workings of his body, and he doesn’t like the feel of them all grinding back to life.

He takes a sip of the shake and concentrates on swallowing. Sam thinks there’s hope, a light at the end of the tunnel, a chance at recovery, but Adam knows there isn’t. He doesn’t even know if  he wants there to be. This doesn’t feel like a return to humanity; it feels like weakness. When the bottle is two-thirds empty, liquid sloshing against the line he’s marked with his finger, he forces himself from the car.

There are a few tables on the outskirts of the crowd. He chooses one with no customers that’s being run by a woman he thinks is around the age he’s supposed to be. She’s wearing bright green overalls and has a feather dangling from her left earlobe.  He picks up a package of brightly-patterned fabric coated in beeswax while she tells him about the evils of plastic wrap. The cereal bowl he abandoned on the counter two weeks ago is sitting in the fridge covered with stiff fabric just like this, crimped neatly around the rim. She has a lisp, and Adam is halfway through saying his high school girlfriend had one too when he realizes that might seem creepy, and anyway, that he’s thinking of a kindergarten classmate, his personal history expanding and contracting at random. He tries to picture Kristen’s face and can’t. 

He ends up, somehow, holding three packages with three distinct geometric patterns. The woman doesn’t even seem embarrassed when she tells him they’ll cost him over a hundred dollars. She wants him to pay with an app he’s never heard of, but his options are old, blood-stained cash and Sam’s credit card. Sam would have given him the card if he’d asked, which is why he stole it off a table in the library two days ago. She picks the cash, saying something he doesn’t follow about transaction fees.

The other nearby tables, selling raw honey sculptures and wicker baskets shaped like fish, all have at least one customer a piece.  Retreating to the car feels like a defeat, so Adam steps off to the side, close to the lot but still technically within the bounds of the market. His phone is dead despite Sam’s multiple reminders to charge it. He puts his earbuds in anyway, dulling the world around him to something manageable. 

Sam emerges from the crowd with two bulging tote bags, a cabbage cradled in his arms, and an elderly man at his side. Adam recognizes Paul from his Instagram, which Sam set up and occasionally has to help him back into. He uses the account to post pictures of jewel-toned jams paired with paragraphs on paragraphs about God’s glory. Adam asked Sam if it made him feel weird and he said, “No, why?” with obviously fake composure. Paul doesn’t usually post pictures of himself, but after the fifth time Adam accused Sam of being in love with him, he dug in the archives for a blurry selfie of the two of them grinning in the sun, cheeks pressed together, so that Adam could see that Paul was roughly seventy with a thick afro of snowy white hair, kindly face creased with age. He pretended then to think Paul and Sam were contemporaries, which wasn’t especially funny but did pass the time.

Paul is nearly as tall as Sam even with a slight stoop, and he spots Adam easily over the heads of the crowd. He waves with so much enthusiasm that Adam has no choice but to wave back.

Sam catches Paul’s arm, pulling him gently to a halt, and they have what Adam can tell even from a distance is a heated, whispered conversation about him. They lean toward each other, heads together, and every so often, Paul turns to look at him. The last time, he’s frowning so ferociously that Adam decides to refocus on his dead phone.

When he looks up next, they’re hugging. The cabbage is on the ground between Sam’s feet so that he can lean into the embrace. Adam is achingly jealous. In one sense, he hasn’t gone this long without physical contact in centuries; after he explained that touch was an actual psychological necessity for humans, Michael was tolerant of and eventually enthusiastic about it. In another sense, though, none of those touches were real, and this body is newborn and sensitive.

Sam is smiling as he approaches, stopping a safe distance away. He hitches the tote bag higher on his shoulder. “Paul says hi."

Adam tucks his dead phone away. “I thought you wanted me to meet him. You know I was looking forward to talking jams.”

“I just thought—" Sam adjusts the cabbage when it starts to slide down his side. He looks back at Paul, still watching. “I thought maybe today wasn’t the best day for it. There’s no rush, right?”

Adam wonders if this is all he has to look forward to, trailing along behind Sam and pretending to be a person. “I told you I’m fine,” he says, his voice tilting into petulance. Sam is only a few inches taller than him, but he’s broad, and he has the wrinkles of someone who’s actually lived his life.

“Well,” Sam says, and hitches the cabbage up again. Despite the argument, his smile is soft and genuine. The market has loosened something in him, his posture relaxed. Even his hair looks shinier, his stupid over-long bangs springier. “You don’t have anything to prove to me, Adam.“

“Yeah, no shit. It’s not like your opinion matters to me.”

Sam continues, nearly but not quite talking over him. “I think you’re incredible. I know exactly how bad the Cage can be, even without—“ He hesitates, shaking his head. The cabbage slips from his grasp, and Adam squats down to pick it up, grateful for the excuse to break eye contact. “The fact that you survived it is amazing. You’re not weak for needing a second to catch your breath.“

Adam balances the cabbage in one hand, the beeswax wrap in the other. The fabric is softening with his body heat; he crushes it between his fingers. The attendant told him the beeswax was good for skin as she looked mournfully at his cuticles.

Sam pulls a mason jar from his bag. It’s nearly the size of his head and contains a rainbow of thinly-sliced vegetables floating in liquid. “This is for you,” he says, as if they’re having a normal conversation. He looks over his shoulder, like it’s important that Paul see the delivery of this gift. Paul grins, gives them a thumbs up, and disappears back into the crowd. “Paul’s really into pickling.“

“I thought it was jams.“

“Anything in a jar, I think. He just started this one last night, said he had a feeling you’d like it.” He holds it out so insistently that Adam has no choice but to trade the cabbage for it, solid in his arms. He tilts the jar back and forth, watching the vegetables fight for space. 

“What am I supposed to do with this?”

“Let it…pickle? Then eat it, I guess. There are details on the side.”

Adam turns the jar in his arms and sees a piece of paper taped to the glass, a few sentences written out in a strong, clear hand. It isn’t the first gift he’s received since leaving the Cage, but it’s the only one that hasn’t come from brotherly guilt, at least not directly.

“Why would he give this to me? What did you tell him about me?” He doesn't ask why Paul recognized him. He had to let Sam take a picture for his new fake ID, which marks him as freshly twenty, older than he was, younger than he is, and still too young to drink.

“Nothing, really. Just that you’re my little brother and you’re going to be staying with me for a while. Until you get sick of me, I guess.“ Sam avoids eye contact, rubbing at the back of his neck. “I’m pretty sure he thought Dean and I were in some kind of doomsday prepper cult, so he has his concerns. That's why he was kind of pushy about meeting you today, I don't know if you noticed, but I just didn’t think it was a good idea.” He slides his tote bag off his arm and holds it open. “I can carry that if you want.”

For a moment, Adam has the insane urge to refuse, to hold on for dear life, but then he hands it over along with the half-open pack of beeswax wrap. Sam grins down at the package, then tucks it and the jar away.

“We should head out. I got some goat cheese; I thought maybe we could try our hand at making our own pizza. I bet we could do better than that place in town.”

On the drive back, Adam slumped in the passenger’s seat, Sam says, “Thank you for coming with me. It means a lot.“

“Uh-huh.” Adam bites off a bit of flesh on the side of his thumb, feeling a satisfying flash of pain as it tears free. “So, you sure you’re not fucking him?”

“Jesus, Adam.”

“I’m just asking. You guys seemed really touchy.”

“We’re friends. He’s a good guy.” Sam looks over, and Adam swallows down the urge to snap at him to keep his eyes on the road. “I am bisexual though. I hope that’s not a problem.”

“Obviously not. I mean, Michael and I were—“ Adam slumps slower in his seat. Sam brought another shake from the cooler while he was stashing the groceries, and he opens it just to have something to do with his hands. It’s strawberry. They’ve all been strawberry for the last couple weeks. It is, he realizes, his favorite.

“I thought maybe— But I wasn’t sure," Sam says, shoulders up near his ears. 

“Yeah.” Adam remembers blood in his mouth, remembers doubling over in pain, remembers thinking his eyes would burn out of his skull. “Yeah, I loved him.” He finds himself momentarily dazed by the past tense, how it renders their history small and contained. “Was in love with him. Whatever.”

“Oh.”

Miles pass in silence except for the tapping of Sam’s fingertips on the wheel and the plasticky crunch of the bottle in Adam’s fist. The rain has started, finally, and he watches a drop slide down his window until his eyes cross and the world blurs into nothingness.

“I know it’s not easy to accept,” Sam says when they’re back on the quiet road to the bunker. “But Michael wasn’t the person you thought he was.”

Adam’s cheek is numb where it’s pressed against the glass of the window. “He was exactly the person I thought he was.”

Sam takes his eyes off the road again, and Adam does snap at him this time. Once he’s safely facing forward, Adam says, “I know he was—“ But his voice cracks. “It didn’t surprise me, what you told me. But I still—” His hands twist in his lap. He’s never asked about bringing Michael back.  He knows what Sam would say, and he knows the delicate, pitying way Sam would say it, and he knows he  can’t fucking stand it.

— — —

“I used to read to you before you woke up,” Sam says from the doorway of the den. Adam is on the floor with his head tipped back against the couch. He didn’t bother asking for Sam’s company tonight, just made enough noise that he couldn’t help being drawn out.

“You’re such a freak,” he says. He hears footsteps cross the room, feels the cushion behind his head shift as Sam sits on the one next to it. There’s enough space between them that he barely feels twitchy.

The movies have been difficult for him, flashy and overwhelming, even the boring ones Sam picks out. He and Michael watched a few movies in the Cage, but they were all his best recollection of films he’d seen before, his memories strung together with Michael’s abilities. It felt real enough at the time, but now he knows it was nothing, a pale imitation of life.

“Are you saying you want to read me a bedtime story?” 

“I’m saying I’m at a really good point in this book, and it’s hard to focus with a movie playing in the background, so you know, if it’s all the same to you…”

With his eyes closed, if he’s careful and still, Adam can almost forget he has a body. He speaks slowly, the words sliding free. “Yeah, man, whatever.” 

Pages rustle above his head. Sam clears his throat. “So this is called Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places.”

Adam snorts. “That cannot seriously be what you read for fun.” He tries not to think of Sam's aborted hunt, of his own neediness.

“I found a book club online, and our first meeting is coming up. It’s really interesting to see how non-hunters make sense of these things.” The couch cushions shift, and Sam says, pointedly casual, “And the meetings are virtual, which is kind of cool.” Adam hates himself for being comforted like he’s meant to be. “I’m kind of nervous about it, actually. Is that dumb?”

“Yes,” says Adam, who can’t go outside and has no friends.

“Uh. Right, okay. ‘The nation was still young when Hawthorne began writing, but he could already draw inspiration from Puritan New England’s buried past and hidden legacy. Salem has long embodied a contradiction in the bedrock of American consciousness: upright piety mixed with hypocrisy, sober religion mixed with violent hysteria. Hawthorne’s own great-great-grandfather John Hathorne was one of the judges who presided over the Salem witch trials of 1692, and Nathaniel had grown up knowing about the family legend—that one of Hathorne’s victims had cursed him and his descendants. Certainly Salem was a place ripe for haunting, and Hawthorne would repeatedly return to the wrongs unavenged in his hometown to propel the more gothic aspects of his fiction. This is the recurring structure of a classic ghost story, after all: the ghost remains because it cannot believe the perverse normality of a world that has gone on living, that has forgotten whatever personal tragedy happened here. The carpets are cleaned, the furniture is sold, and the house continues with new inhabitants, the ghost alone keeping vigil over whatever once took place.”

“Is this a metaphor?” Adam asks. He can hear his heart, sharp in his chest. “Am I the ghost?”

“No.” The book clicks shut. “You know what, I don’t have to read this; I wasn’t thinking.”

“Are you the ghost then?”

“No one’s the ghost,” Sam says. “Except actual ghosts, I mean. I really can read something else.”

“It’s fine. I’m fine.” It’s a stupid lie because Adam is never fine, but it gets Sam to keep reading, and then, somehow, it becomes almost true. He's a shitty reader, audibly nervous and prone to absolutely repulsive mouth sounds, but the nerves that keep Adam perpetually tense smooth out as he listens. 

He wakes up with a blanket draped over him, a pillow between his head and the floor. He has vague memories of Sam trying to get him onto the couch without touching him or raising his voice above a whisper. He knows without looking that Sam is still behind him. His mom left him alone at night as soon as he was old enough, and he remembers waking up after bad dreams and walking the floors of the house, empty and cavernous around him.

He doesn’t move or speak, but Sam starts reading aloud again, now in a creaky whisper. The room is dark except for the dim illumination of his book light. Adam has elected not to add afraid of the dark to his already pitiful psychological profile, so this doesn’t bother him. 

“Is this you trying to tell me you miss hunting?” he asks after a few minutes, cutting Sam off in the middle of a long description of a haunted bridge. “‘Cause I’m not like. I mean, I won’t die if you go. It was just a bad day.”

Sam puts the book down on the couch with a quiet thump. “Were you lonely as a kid?”

“What?” He props himself up on one elbow but doesn’t look at Sam just yet.

“I mean— Do you remember when we first met?”

“Do I remember digging myself out of a fucking grave and getting possessed like, right after? Yeah, dude, I remember.” The raw anger that filled him then is beyond him. With the blanket still around his shoulders, he feels quiet, tired, warm. He’s remembering what he learned early in the Cage; it’s hard to hate the only person you have.

“Right,” Sam says. “Well, you told me how it was just you and your mom growing up. It seemed lonely.”

“She was a good mom,” Adam says, reaching for a defensiveness he doesn’t quite feel. He loves his mother, still, now, but he doesn’t always remember her. He feels stupid sitting on the floor, blanket sliding down his chest, so he pulls himself onto the couch, putting as much distance between them as he can. 

“I’m sure she was. That’s not what I’m saying.” Sam squeezes the paperback in his hand, folding it in on itself, then lets go. Everything but the front cover springs back into shape. The book light clipped to the top falls free and turns off when it hits the floor, plunging them into a velvety dark he breaks only after a few seconds.

“Then what are you saying? ‘Cause I asked you a pretty simple question and now we’re talking moms.” This comes out meaner than Adam intends for it to, but it’s hard to really judge with Sam, who always looks freshly-slapped.

“It’s just— I was a lonely kid. It didn’t really make sense; I was pretty much always with Dad and Dean in that car or crammed into some tiny motel room. I mean, it was suffocating and overwhelming, but I still felt really alone. Dean was a good big brother; I’m not saying he wasn’t. I would never say that. But Dad was strict with us. With both of us, but I pushed back more, so I always felt like I got it worse. I don’t know how fair that was, but it’s how I felt. A lot of the time it was like they were on this whole separate team without me. Keeping secrets, leaving me behind. Then when I finally did start hunting— I mean, it wasn’t that I’d wanted to be part of it, just that I was so sick of being alone. And I never really was a part of it, even when I was right there with them. For a long time I felt more like something to be hunted.” This is by far the most interesting thing Sam has ever said, so of course he doesn’t expand on it.

“It wasn’t all bad; I’m not saying that. But it was complicated, and by the end, it made things between Dean and me complicated. We were always going from one emergency to another. Most of them were our fault in the first place, if I’m being honest. You get caught up in the cycle of trying to make things okay and just making them worse. And then all of a sudden it was just—over. God was dead, no one was gunning for us. Even though I’d wanted to be out for a long time, I didn’t know what to do without the fear and guilt to motivate me. And maybe I thought I owed it to Dean, too. To go back out there. Have you ever heard of survivor’s guilt?”

“No, dude, I grew up in a fucking barn.”

“Right, of course. In my defense, if you live like I have, it’s pretty easy to lose track of what is or isn’t common knowledge.” This is a fair point, but Adam would prefer not to admit it; resenting Sam’s condescension feels safe and familiar. “Anyway, I felt selfish, not hunting. But then I realized I actually couldn’t. You were here, and what would happen to you if something happened to me? You gave me an excuse to put it off. Then you did it again, after you woke up.” Adam winces, remembering how it felt to beg for Sam’s company. “You gave me the chance to reevaluate. The space to think about how I actually wanted my life to be. That isn’t something I’ve had in a long time. And I realized that hunting, it was never not lonely. It got better and it got worse, but it never stopped being lonely.”

Adam pulls his knees to his chest. His socks, he realizes in the yellowing lamplight, don't match. “Are you saying you’re not lonely now?” He doesn't know what he'll do if Sam says he isn't, doesn't know if he'll feel guilty or resentful or just hopelessly, helplessly jealous.

Sam looks down at the book in his hands, at the sharp fold in the cover that will never smooth out. “No," he says, "I'm not saying that."

Chapter Text

Adam sits on the kitchen counter with his legs crossed. Sam asked him to move, then told him to move, and is now just working as if he isn’t there, kneading a ball of dough that’s supposed to turn into a pizza but seems determined to tear itself to pieces beneath his fingers.

“I guess that’s what the flour was for,” Adam says. The recipe called for a liberal dusting. Sam scattered a few pinches across the countertop before tipping out the dough.

“Shut up and drink your milkshake,” Sam says, then freezes like a hunted animal. He looks at Adam, at the dough, at Adam again. His mouth twists up. His eyes brighten. This is a kind of power, Adam thinks. Worse than having an archangel in his pocket, but not nothing: the ability to make the only person he has totally miserable. After a minute of tight silence, he forces a laugh and watches Sam relax.

The milkshake in question  is chalky from the unacknowledged addition of some kind of nutritional powder, which makes Adam feel like a dog being tricked into taking its heartworm medicine. The amount of whipped cream Sam put on it contributes to that feeling but also inclines him to be a lot more forgiving. He waits for Sam to look away before taking another sip, but the straw betrays him, producing a loud slurp as it sucks against the bottom of the cup. Sam's smile grows smaller and more genuine. 

He’s been calmer since the farmers’ market, like he’s no longer terrified that Adam will go to pieces the second he lets his guard down, or at least like he no longer thinks it will be his fault when it happens. The last time he went grocery shopping, he stopped for coffee with Paul, leaving Adam alone in the bunker for a staggering two hours. He came back with a sourdough starter that lives in the fridge and seems to frighten him.  He and Paul have done a few video-calls since then, which as far as Adam can tell mostly involve Paul reassuring him about the starter’s behavior as it threatens to outgrow its jar. 

Adam’s mostly managed to avoid getting caught up in this, but the one time he was stupid enough to walk into the library without listening at the door, Paul insisted on having Sam leave the room so that they could talk alone. He asked Adam a series of questions about his mental health and support network outside of Sam, smiling kindly as  he stonewalled. He insisted on having Adam take down his phone number—Adam drew tight spirals on a post-it and then had to listen to the whole thing again when Paul called him out. Then, even though he’d just implied Sam was indoctrinating him into some kind of cult, he pressed for details about Sam’s well-being.

Sam leans over the counter, picking at bits of dough that won’t come up. The strands of hair that have escaped from his bun barely miss being coated in slime. 

“You’re really bad at this,” Adam says.

Sam’s face shines with sweat, and his hands look like they’re molting. “Do you think you could do any better?”

“Probably not, but that’s why I get my pizza at the pizza place like a normal person.”

“I get your pizza at the pizza place,” Sam says, then goes still again. He looks at Adam, who looks at the unmarked soles of his sneakers. “I didn’t mean that how it sounded.”

Adam tries to smile, to force another laugh, but the noise that comes out is unconvincing. “You’re not wrong.”

“I really didn’t mean it that way. I like having you here. I like being able to help you.”

The laugh that falls from Adam’s mouth this time is genuine and bitter. “Oh, yeah, ‘cause that tracks with the last ten years. You’re just desperate to help me.” He hasn’t experienced true anger since the Cage, and that isn’t what he has now either, but there is something trying to force its way out, something demanding to be felt.

“Adam… We thought— We didn’t think there was anything left to save. It’s not an excuse; we should have tried. But I knew what it was like for me, and you’d been there so long, alone.” Adam starts to say that he wasn’t alone, and Sam talks over him, tight and rushed. “We were wrong about that. We were wrong about all of it. We thought Michael had gone crazy, and we thought you— We just didn’t think we could do anything to help you.” Adam tries not to picture this theoretical version of him, tortured with no hope of escape, too broken to be worth saving. “I’ve made a lot of bad choices in my life, but leaving you in there was one of the worst. I should have known better, but I didn’t— I couldn’t—“ Sam tugs at his fingers, unfurling gloves of dough into the bowl. “It’s genuinely amazing to have you here now. To know you’re okay.”

Adam doesn’t realize he’s biting his nails until a sliver comes off between his teeth and takes a chunk of skin with it. He doesn’t want to need Sam’s help, doesn’t want to be his second chance. A bright bead of blood wells up on his finger, and Sam, who is always, always watching, stops what he’s doing to grab the first aid kit. He digs through piles of gauze and bandages and tiny bottles of whiskey before finally coming up with a normal bandaid and an alcohol wipe. He steps forward like he thinks he’s going to apply them himself, but Adam holds out the hand that isn’t bleeding. This is nothing; he’s hurt himself worse since waking up. The boundaries of his body are just never quite where he wants them to be. Still, there’s something startling, every time, about these tiny human pains. He puts the bandaid on a bit too tight, but it comes loose as soon as he flexes his finger.

“We don’t need to talk about this.” 

Sam nods jerkily. He covers the bowl with a square of the beeswax wrap that is technically Adam’s, then sets it to the side and grabs a mesh produce bag full of mushrooms, pulling them out one at a time and arranging them on the counter. Some are long and thin, others curved and frilly, nothing like the simple white caps Adam remembers from his Windom refrigerator.

“I’m not sure what to do with this,” Sam admits, showing Adam a fist-sized clump of mushrooms all curving away from the same point. “I mean, I grew up in a car. I just thought it seemed cool.” He sets it down, and it rocks back and forth on the counter before reaching equilibrium. “Anyway, I like spending time with you.”

“Why? I’m such a dick to you.”

Sam rotates the mass, holding a knife to it at different angles before beginning to chop it into uneven chunks. “Well, Dean was mostly a dick to me. Brothers are complicated.”

Adam feels, not for the first time, a surge of resentful pity. “God, that’s depressing.”

“Anyway, you’re not always a dick.”

“Well, there’s a ringing endorsement.”

Sam snorts. “You can’t have it both ways, kid.”

The word startles a laugh out of Adam. “Did you just call me kid? I’m older than you, asshole.” Sam’s smile disappears, and Adam groans. He wants a life without landmines, without someone being forever cautious of his imagined triggers. “If you apologize again, I’m gonna scream.”

“Okay,” Sam says, “I won’t apologize.” He turns his attention back to the mushrooms. The knife wobbles in his hand, and he shaves off a piece thin enough to see through, then one as thick as a finger.

“Oh, Jesus,” Adam says, and slides off the counter. “Would you give me that?” He takes the knife out of Sam’s hand, realizing too late that it’s the first moment of skin-to-skin contact he’s had since waking up. He fights back a shiver. “Move.”

Sam steps away from the counter and lets Adam take his place.

“Shouldn’t you be better with a knife? I figured the serial killing’d be decent practice.”

Sam takes a breath. Not a wounded breath, Adam thinks, more like the breath right before a lecture about the moral complexities of hunting. “Joke,” he hurries to add. “Just a joke.”

Adam was never an especially talented cook, and he doesn’t remember much now, but he has enough muscle memory to reduce the mushrooms to roughly equal pieces. “See? Not that hard.” He uses the blade of the knife to shape the pile into a square.

“Again, I grew up in a car.”

“Excuses, excuses,” Adam says, then feels a very Sam-like urge to apologize. Instead of pulling himself onto the counter, he takes a few steps back. Sam moves into the space he’s vacated, passing him the dregs of his milkshake without being asked.

The dough was supposed to double in size, but it looks, if anything, smaller and sadder and wetter. Sam dumps it onto the counter and starts to roll it out, ignoring where it sticks and tears. His hands shake when he lifts the rolling pin.

Adam can see red on his own hands where his teeth tore at the cuticles. The band-aid has landed, somehow, in the corner of the kitchen. “Michael was a bad person,” he says. He sticks his thumb in his mouth then rubs it against a white spot on his jeans. “He hurt me, but I forgave him because— He was doing what he thought was right at the time. And he was sorry. And it didn’t make sense to keep hating him. It didn’t make anything better. It didn’t help.”

The dough is coming apart under Sam’s fingers, but he keeps working it. “I can understand that.”

— — — 

“Adam…“ Sam rubs his eyes, nudging his reading glasses high up on his forehead. They make him look old, Adam thinks, and is savagely jealous. “I’m nearly forty; I can’t keep falling asleep on the couch.”

“Oh.“ Adam’s hands dig deeper into the pocket on the front of his sweatshirt. He doesn’t seek Sam out every night, but it’s a near thing, and he shouldn’t be surprised to have finally found the limit to his patience. “No, yeah, obviously. I mean, I wasn’t even gonna— Whatever. Forget it.”

“Wait, wait, that’s not what I'm saying. I just meant that we could move your bed in here, if you wanted. It might be easier. Better. I mean, I’m sure it’s important to you to have your own space, and your room would still be your room, obviously, but you could sleep in here. If you wanted.”

 Of the many miseries of Adam’s long half-life, this is perhaps the worst, and he can’t find it in himself to speak. He slouches lower in his sweatshirt, wishing for something to fidget with, but his dead phone is on his bedside table inches from the charger.

“Forget it,” Sam says when the silence finally tips over into excruciating. “It was a stupid idea. I’m sorry if I offended you.”

“No, that’s like—“ Adam’s hands twist together. “I guess it makes sense.” If he can get through this one moment, he won’t have to ask again, and he won’t have to be alone on the nights when he can’t bear to.

Sam smiles at him, gently, sadly. “It does get easier, Adam.”

Adam lets Sam lead the way back to his room, waiting in the doorway while Sam steps inside. It would be a mess if he owned anything more than the three shirts and two pairs of jeans he was given when he woke up. As it is, it looks like a place no one has ever even tried to live.

Sam steps back, hands on his hips, as he evaluates. “Shouldn’t be too hard to get this on its side. Do you want to—“ He looks at Adam, still in the doorway, then leans down and braces his hands on the underside of the bedframe. It lifts a few inches, but he lets out a noise like a deflating balloon and drops it, straightening up with one hand on his lower back.

“Okay,” he says, his face red with either exertion or embarrassment.“Okay, look. It’s really late. What if we just move the mattress tonight and come back for the frame in the morning? It’s uh. It’s more solid than it looks.”

Adam recognizes this, his last chance to turn back, to retain some shred of his dignity, but he feels himself shrug. “Fine, that’s fine.”

Sam takes the pillows and blankets off the bed, piling them on the bedside table. One of the pillows falls to the floor, and he ignores Adam when he says it doesn’t matter, rearranging everything until he gets the balance right.

Then, finally, Adam has no choice but to step fully into the room and pull his hands from his sweatshirt. He waits until Sam has picked one end of the mattress, then mirrors his position. He hasn’t used his body for much since waking up, and he’s worried it will fail him, but the mattress is light held between the two of them. Sam leads the way, walking backwards down the winding halls and taking what Adam suspects is more than his share of the weight.

They stand in Sam’s bedroom with the mattress in the air for almost a minute before Adam understands that he’s supposed to decide where to put it. He inclines his head toward a spot in the corner, and Sam nearly trips over his feet moving toward it. Adam barely waits until they’ve set it down before turning away. A few months ago, he had an archangel inside him, and now he’s living on his half-brother’s floor.

He spends longer than he needs to retrieving his pillows and blankets from his room. When he isn’t with Sam, he sleeps under three thick comforters that don’t do anything about the gaping icy hole inside him, and though he’s made his bed all of once since waking up, he makes a point now of folding each one into a neat stack on the floor. 

When he has no more excuses, he returns to find Sam’s mattress on the floor next to his. Sam doesn’t look up, head bowed over his book. Adam takes a steadying breath, indulging in the illusion of privacy before dropping his blankets and following them down. The mattress is thin, and he can feel the hard floor in his bones. 

“I hope this is okay,” Sam says, gesturing to the patch of floor between them. “I thought— But if you want more space…”

Adam wants to tug his blankets over his head, but that would be too obviously infantile. He settles for wrapping them around himself and hunching low inside them. “It’s fine.”

Sam keeps talking, filling the space Adam leaves open between them. “We can watch something, if you want. There’s this documentary I’ve been wanting to check out about the Kentucky meat shower.” Adam raises an eyebrow, and Sam shifts to face him. He’s animated, cheery, trying painfully hard. “So get this. It’s 1876. Kentucky. This housewife walks out her front door and nearly gets hit in the head by chunks of meat falling from the sky. All these years later, we still don’t really know what caused it, even though it’s been studied extensively.”

Most of the things Sam likes are unbelievably boring, so Adam is surprised to hear himself say, “Oh, sick. That’s actually kinda cool.”

“The most widely-accepted theory is that it came from vultures regurgitating their lunch, but I do wonder if there was something supernatural at play. Do you want to check it out?”

“Actually, um. I mean, if you’re working on that book anyway.” Adam nods to the paperback in Sam’s lap, booklight clipped to the cover. “I wouldn’t mind if you just wanted to keep reading. Anyway, we don’t really have a good angle on the TV over here.” This is true—they are very nearly behind the screen—yet somehow unconvincing, even to Adam.

Sam doesn’t laugh, his kindness another thing Adam can never repay. “Yeah, of course. Should I get the light?” He unfolds himself from the mattress to flip the switch by the door, picking his way back to their spot in the corner using the booklight’s dim glow. The dark feels heavy, and Adam lets out a breath when Sam settles down across from him. 

“This one’s about an expedition to the North Pole. Also the 1870s, I think.” Sam flips the book over to check, eyes scanning quickly down the back cover. “Yeah, 1879. At this point, their boat is stuck in the pack ice. It’s really interesting, actually. Uh. Okay. ‘The ice began to squeeze the ship—literally, to strangle it. Beads of oakum tar and pine pitch oozed from the seams. At one point, the decks bulged. The wooden planks were so obviously stressed that De Long expected them to rupture.

“Several times, he prepared to abandon the ship. Supplies were stockpiled on the deck, the boats made ready for lowering, and the sleds stuffed with forty days’ worth of provisions. De Long instructed the men to sleep with their clothes on and to pack their knapsacks and bedrolls. There wasn’t much else they could do but listen—and wait.

“‘We live in a weary suspense,’ De Long wrote. ‘Wintering in the pack may be a thrilling thing to read about alongside a warm fire, but the actual thing is sufficient to make any man prematurely old. A crisis may occur at any moment, and we can do nothing but be thankful in the morning that it has not come during the night, and at night that it has not come since the morning. Living over a powder-mill waiting for an explosion would be a similar mode of existence.’”

“Okay, now this one’s definitely a metaphor,” Adam says, wrapping his blankets more tightly around his shoulders. When Sam discovered his constant chill, he started spending even more time in the library, poring over stacks and stacks of books. They’re currently waiting to hear back from someone named Rowena, whose late response Sam says can be excused because she’s busy ruling Hell. In the meantime, Sam has been giving him mugs of sharp, grassy tea that make him feel tingly and slow, but not warm.

“How do you figure?”

“The ship’s the bunker, the ice is like, your repressed grief and my shattered mental health, and we’re the idiots who got on a boat to the Arctic.”

Sam grins. “I could’ve sworn your major was pre-med, not English.”

“Do you ever read anything that’s not about people being like, trapped and tormented by their choices or the choices of their ancestors?”

“Huh, I guess not. Wonder if that means something.”

He doesn’t offer to switch books, and Adam doesn’t ask him to. He lies down and shuts his eyes, his hands clasped on his stomach. When the dark of his eyelids gets to be too much, he opens them. Sam, sitting in his circle of light, is focused on his reading. The pages turn slowly as he creaks his way through the passages. 

“So your new life,” Adam starts, cutting Sam off mid-word. “Is this what you want from it?”

Sam looks up, the book closed on a finger to mark his place. “What do you mean?”

“You said before that you get to choose for yourself now. Is this really what you choose? Babysitting me for the rest of your life? You’re what, fifty? Not a lot of good years left, dude.” Sam doesn’t react to the dig, just turns so that he’s facing Adam more fully. Adam sits up but doesn’t meet his gaze. 

“You’ve only been out for a couple of months, and you’re—“ Sam’s voice hitches the way it always does when he has to acknowledge Michael. “You’re in mourning on top of everything else. It makes sense that you’re struggling, but I promise it won’t always be this hard.”

“I was in there a thousand years, Sam. I’m a thousand years fucked up. If I’m lucky I’ll be sleeping through the night when I’m eighty. Christ.” Adam squeezes his pillow between his hands. “What am I supposed to do if you decide you want a life? Or— I mean, something could happen to you. We’re only human.”

“Nothing is going to happen to me,” Sam says, voice strained.

“Oh, don’t bullshit me. I’m not some kid who doesn’t understand where Grandma went.”

“I didn’t mean it that way. It’s just that I’m not hunting anymore. I’m not exactly in harm’s way on a regular basis.”

“Still, anything could happen. I bet this bunker’s loaded with lead and, and asbestos. Or you could give yourself food poisoning. Or get in an accident in that stupid car of yours.”

“It’s actually very a highly-rated vehicle with a lot of safety features.”

This doesn’t merit a response, so Adam doesn’t bother providing one. “I mean, what would I even do, just fucking rot down here?”

“You wouldn’t. You’re a survivor, Adam. You’ve proven that.”

This is something Adam believed about himself in his old life, and even well into his new one. He coped when he was just a lonely kid in too many AP classes. He coped in the Cage, better even than an archangel. But now he’s out, with another chance at life, and he can’t take it.

“You know, I was happy with Michael. I’m sure it sounds crazy to you, but I was. Even in the Cage sometimes. I was happy. And now I’m—“ He gestures to the whole of Sam’s bedroom, meaning something between pathetic and desperate and totally useless. 

“I know this has been difficult, but it will get better.”

“You don’t know that,” Adam says, and suddenly the anger he’s been missing for months works its way free. “Oh my God, you don’t know that! You talk like we went through the same thing, but we didn’t! And yeah, obviously your thing was worse, I get that, but—“

“I would never say that.”

“No, I know, and I bet you wouldn’t even let yourself think it because you feel so guilty you can’t even tell me to fuck off when I pull you out of bed in the middle of the night, but objectively, torture is worse than not-torture. That’s not even— I’m not saying what happened to me wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t literal skin-flaying torture.” He hugs the pillow tighter, thinking of Paul’s embrace in the watery grey light of the farmers’ market. Being touched makes him feel too real, reminds him that he’ll be living this life until it’s gone.

“Comparing traumas—“ Sam starts, and Adam groans.

“Oh my God, shut up. My point is that it’s not just about what happened. It’s how it happened, and for how long. You think because you came back and you’re—“ He hesitates before describing Sam as “managing, that it’ll be the same for me, but it won’t. Hundreds of years passed for me. My real life was down there. I was human for nineteen years; I’ve been something else for much longer. And I’m glad to be out, obviously I’m glad to be out, but I can’t just shake that off.”

“I know it’s an adjustment—“

“I am not going to adjust,” Adam says, in a shaky, cold voice he doesn’t recognize. “This isn’t what I want. This isn’t the life I want. Does that matter to you?”

“Of course it matters. I want you to be happy.”

“You want me to be happy pretending to be some kid who’s been dead for a decade.” Adam sees Sam wince, and despite himself, he softens his tone. “Look, I know you’re trying. And I do—appreciate that. I just can’t—“ But that’s not how he wants to frame this, true as it is. Sam has seen enough to know how much he can’t do. “I miss Michael. I miss the person I was with him.” He’s been afraid to ask this, afraid to live with the no when he’s so utterly dependent on Sam. Their relationship can’t bear more resentment. “You could help me bring him back, couldn’t you?”

Sam takes a sharp breath. Adam doesn’t think the request should be a surprise, even if he has waited too long to make it, but the silence between them drags on until Sam finally says, “I honestly don’t know. The Empty is angry and—watchful, and Jack is still very new. We barely got Castiel out, and that tactic won’t work twice. And even if we could manage it, it’s just too dangerous. Even with Jack in Heaven, Michael could do real harm to the world. I am sorry, Adam.”

Adam is grateful to be sitting outside the book light’s dim glow. Part of him wishes for comfort, for shared warmth, but he’s flinched away too many times for Sam to offer it. Anything he wants, he'll have to ask for, so this has to be enough.

“Michael won’t do anything,” he says, and even though he believes it, knows it, it sounds like wishful thinking, a child’s belief in a fairytale. “I can keep him in check, I know I can. I got him to help you before, remember? You can’t possibly think that was all Castiel brute-forcing daddy issues into his head. I talked him down. I kept him cool.”

“And that is impressive. The connection you and Michael had, it’s—“ Sam gives a short, quick jerk of his head. “I’m not questioning it. But he went back to God in the end. He would have helped him destroy the world. It wouldn’t be responsible to—“

“He didn’t have anything else!” It sounds absurd, even to Adam’s ears, to describe himself as the only thing between an archangel and a vengeful God. The truth of it doesn’t make it any better. “Are you really going to tell me you’ve never done anything fucked up because you couldn’t stand to be alone?” 

The light wavers. “I can’t say that. I’ve done more harm than I can bear to think about. But with Michael there’s. Well, there’s an issue of scale. Have I ever told you about Apocalypseworld?”

“Apocalypseworld?” Adam repeats. “What’s— No, forget it, I don’t care. That’s not the point. Look, do you know what Michael and I were doing between the bunker and the rapture? We were traveling. I wanted to see the seven wonders of the world and he wanted to show me— God, I don’t know, some plants he liked when he was on Earth millennia ago. And when we weren’t traveling, we were at home, and he was decorating the little beachfront apartment he got for me. He was trying to learn to cook the human way because I was stupid enough to show him the nutrition facts in some restaurant. I’m not saying he was a good person. I get that he wasn’t. I get that he probably deserves to be in the Empty for the rest of eternity. But if you give him back to me, he won’t hurt anyone. I know he won’t.”

“It’s not that I don’t trust your judgment,” Sam says, in the voice of someone who does not trust Adam’s judgment, “but it’s a big risk. And maybe— I want to be responsible, but I’m not a saint. Your happiness is important to me, and if I thought it would be good for you— But I think it’s a mistake. I know it doesn’t feel like it now; I know you don’t believe me, but you could have a life without him. A future. A chance to figure out who you are on your own. You never really got that the first time around, did you? You were so young.”

“I was young; I’m not now. That person—“ Adam has a sudden, visceral flash of the excitement he felt when he first walked into his college dorm, of the way the rest of his life seemed to unfurl ahead of him. “That’s not what I want. And this can’t be what you want either. You can’t seriously be happy trapped here with me.”

Sam leans closer to include Adam in his circle of light. He says with impossible earnestness, “Adam, I don’t feel trapped.”

Adam makes himself set the pillow down on his crossed legs, ignoring how empty his arms feel. “Well, you fucking should. You can’t even go to a farmers’ market  or your stupid book club without worrying about me.”

“I don’t mind that,” Sam says, and when Adam just stares at him, he continues, “You’re family. It’s normal to make sacrifices for family.”

Adam elects not to point out that they aren’t family in any way that counts. It’s true, but he doesn’t know what will happen to him if Sam figures it out. “But this sacrifice is never going to end. It’s never going to get better. How do you not get that?”

“Because it’s not true. Look, Adam, I’ve been where you are. Not exactly where you are; you’re right about that, but I’ve had plenty of experiences I thought I would never come back from. And yeah, I didn’t come back exactly the same, but I came back. If you weren’t getting any better, you wouldn’t have come to the market with me at all. There’s no way you would have talked to Paul when you first woke up. I am sorry about that, by the way. He’s intense, but he’s a good guy. I think you’re right that you’ll never be the exact person you were before, but you’re wrong that he’s dead. I think he survived a lot of tough things to become the person you are now, and I wish you would give that person a chance.”

Sam’s words hit Adam somewhere just below his heart. It’s true that the Adam who woke up in a bedroom he didn’t recognize wouldn’t have braved the market or tolerated Paul’s probing, but he doesn’t know how to feel that improvement; all he feels is stagnant and small.

He stands abruptly, one of his blankets sloughing off. He hesitates in the space between their mattresses, then manages, “Do you mind if I—“ and a gesture that does not at all communicate sit down. After a moment’s pause, though, Sam moves over to make space. Adam sinks down next to him, still cloaked in two of his blankets. The light is no longer attached to the cover of Sam's book, its flexible neck clenched in one fist. Adam takes a breath and bumps a shoulder against his. They're both solid, both real.

“You act like you know what you’re talking about, but you’re still a mess. You don’t sleep, and you live in this creepy bunker, and your only friend thinks you’re recruiting teenaged boys to some kind of cult.”

“That’s exactly how I know what I’m talking about. I’m not claiming to be an expert or pretending to be fixed, but I am so much better than I used to be.”

“No offense, but that’s really sad.”

“I disagree. I’ve worked hard to make it this far, and I feel lucky to be here. With you. I know you think this is all guilt and obligation, but it isn’t. I care about you, Adam. Not because you're the kid we screwed over ten years ago, or because you're my dad's son. Because you're you, the person I’ve gotten to know over the last few months. I like that person. He’s been through a lot, and he’s figuring it out, and I think that’s really impressive.”

Adam pulls his knees up to his chest and loses another blanket in the process. “It was just me and my mom when I was a kid. She had to be able to count on me. And with Michael in the Cage—I couldn’t have survived without him, obviously; that’s just a fact, but I kept him together in there. He loved his dad so much, and having let him down almost broke him. If he’d been alone, he wouldn’t have made it. I felt useful. And now I can’t do anything.” Somehow, admitting this feels worse than living it.

“Maybe,” Sam starts. He presses his shoulder more firmly against Adam’s. “Maybe if you’ve spent your whole life supporting other people, you deserve a break. Maybe you’re more than what you can do for the people around you. Maybe you should focus on your own well-being instead of rushing to play therapist for Michael again.”

“But I don’t want—“ Adam hesitates. He can’t think of how to phrase this in a way that won’t prompt another painfully earnest discussion of how he matters, how he has a self and a life and they both have value.  He doesn’t want to be alone with his emotions, doesn’t want to give them room to grow. He never had the time as a kid, and Michael’s presence was so loud that he could almost always let it drown out what he didn’t want to experience. “When I was killed—when I was possessed—when I was thrown in the Cage— something was taken from me. A person I might have been, a life I might have had. And I figured out how to work around that, how to want something new. And then that was taken from me, and you’re asking me to be happy about it.”

“I’m not asking you to be happy, just to be patient. Give yourself a chance.” Sam stretches his legs out in front of him, knees clicking as they unfold.  “The freedom I have now,” he says carefully, “is not something I could have had when Dean was alive. It’s not that I don’t miss him, because I do. More than I've ever missed anyone. If I could bring him back—if I thought he wanted to come back—“ He drops the light, and it turns off when it hits the floor. The darkness only lasts for a second as he scrambles to grab it. “Of course I miss him. But the life I’m building now couldn’t happen if he were here. In a lot of ways, things were easier before. Well, not easier; we had like eight apocalypses. Simpler, maybe. I didn’t have as many choices as I do now."

"If I said I loved him—" Adam starts, desperate, last-ditch.

"I'd believe you. But I'd also say that when you need someone, it's easier to love them than hate them."

Adam doesn't press his point, though he could. His love for Michael is as real as anything in his new life, even if it began as something contextual and desperate. Sam won't get it, or will get it too well.

"I don’t know if I’m always happier now, but I am more myself. I was never sure that was a good thing to be. Maybe sometimes it wasn't, but it’s better than the alternative. Do you understand what I’m saying, Adam?”

Adam is nearly certain he doesn't believe this, that he would prefer to be the safe, secure, half-a-person his love for Michael made him. But he's tired of arguing, tired of begging, tired of waiting for something out of reach. He takes a deep breath. It’s bitter in his mouth, but he feels it expand his lungs, settle in his chest. He lets himself nod. It's a small motion; anyone but Sam would miss it, but they've been stuck together too long for it to go unnoticed. Sam puts an arm around his shoulders and squeezes, just for a second.

“It’s been hard work, really hard, but it’s worth it.”

"Yeah, man, I got it. You're not as deep as you think you are." Adam retrieves one of his lost blankets and drapes it over his shoulders, pulling away from Sam in the process. The cold isn't any better, but it isn't any worse. Livable. "Now weren't you supposed to be reading? I gotta find out what happens with this ice."