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Nobody remembers what happened. Not Adam himself, certainly. All he remembers is hanging out in the little apartment in a town near Seattle (far away from his closest relatives, he hopes) and trading some choice remarks over the latest episode of Hell’s Kitchen. It is not without irony, Adam notes, that Michael finds this show more than mildly entertaining.
“Why does Elise do that boop thing when she doesn’t have an answer?” Michael asks with a grimace.
Adam shrugs and is about to say something nasty about Elise. Or at least he thinks he was going to. Because the next thing he knows, the television is no longer showing Hell’s Kitchen and it is no longer nighttime but bright outside. Also, Michael isn’t sitting beside him.
His first instinct is a rush of dread and fear, that the relative tranquility he had constructed for himself and Michael has been destroyed, and that maybe all that was just an illusion he conjured up for himself and he is really still stuck in the Cage with Michael.
Adam manages to calm down after a while and he checks his phone. No messages of any sort - not that he was expecting any, but he noticed that a day has gone by within the blink of an eye. He rushes to his window and peers at the street outside. Nothing seems amiss except for a few people wandering around, looking similarly confused.
“Michael? What happened?” Adam calls out. He grabs his keys and leaves his apartment, intending to head down to the cafe down the street to see if he could learn anything.
“Michael?” He calls again just before he steps into the elevator.
Something is wrong.
Adam retreats from the elevator and hurries back to his apartment. He needs to be alone for this. Something is wrong. Michael is missing. This has never happened.
Adam hasn’t been alone for over a thousand years and now he feels a thousand kinds of wrong. He feels it in the dull air around him. He feels it settling into his bones, a sour and chilly ache. He feels it in his soul.
His soul, he remembers. Michael’s grace. He really is gone.
He gets to his knees by his bed, wondering to himself how people pray to angels to get in touch with them. They simply prayed, right? Like the eyes closed, hands clasped, knees on the floor, sort of praying?
“Michael, where are you? Are you safe?” Adam thinks in his voice, hoping with all his might that this works.
Silence.
“Michael, if you’re pulling a prank on me, this isn’t funny,” he adds, hoping that humour would prompt a reply. “Not unless we were some couple running a YouTube prank channel.”
Nothing. Adam sighs.
“Michael? Please tell me you’re okay,“ Adam tries again but this time in Enochian. He has picked up the language during his years with Michael. Maybe prayers in Enochian get fast-tracked to angels.
There are many maybes in his mind, but that’s all Adam has now to keep him going.
*
Michael never responded.
It has been almost a year since that day when everyone disappeared. No one has ever been able to come up with an explanation, but the world returned to normalcy soon enough. Meanwhile, Adam has made it a daily habit to pray to Michael, hoping to receive a sign from him. He also made it a daily habit to journal, to chronicle his days as he tries to rebuild his life from scratch, all alone in this world.
He doesn’t bother to look for Sam or Dean. They never reached out since that day and he figured that it is better to leave them in the past. The past is something he so desperately wants to forget.
Except that he can’t. How can one forget a life like his? A life spent in the bowels of Hell, trapped with God’s most loyal soldier for a thousand years?
How could Adam forget their banter, initially aggressive and confrontational, before curiosity got the better of them?
How could Adam forget hearing Michael’s stories of creation? Of Michael’s amusement at Adam’s stories of humanity’s quirks?
How could Adam forget the feeling of grace embracing his soul and coursing through his veins: warm, invigorating, viscous, and smooth?
The journal will be useful, Adam reminds himself every time. When Michael comes back, Adam can tell him all about all he has done in his absence, from the lows to the highs and everything in between.
He will tell Michael about the depths of despair he fell into in the first month following that day, before he realised that he needed to haul his ass out of the apartment instead of surviving off pizza and soda, watching the television all day. He grins at the thought of this, already imagining Michael’s scowl of disapproval and half-amusement.
He couldn’t bring himself to return to college to finish up pre-med, so he became a paramedic instead. It took him about 10 months to finish paramedic school and he just became qualified a month ago. It was a flurry of lectures, shifts, and field internships, sometimes adding up to more than 60 hours of work and study in a week. However, that meant that he was kept sufficiently busy. Being busy was, and is good. It keeps his mind off other things.
Becoming a paramedic also allows him to somewhat follow his childhood dream of saving lives, and considering that Michael is the patron saint of paramedics, Adam thinks that would be most appropriate. Again, he smiles at the thought of Michael giving a small nod of approval, and Adam knows him well enough to know that Michael would be immensely proud of him, even if he doesn't want to show it.
And so in the past year, he has forged new connections and found new friends. He has decorated his house and regularly invites guests over. He saves lives daily and he writes all of it in his journal.
He picks up his pen and starts to detail his day. He wasn’t on shift today so he took the time for himself and headed downtown to stroll along the waterfront, looking into Elliott Bay. The stroll was a brief respite from his first month at work which has been unusually busy. Or maybe that was the usual pace, Adam can’t be sure since he didn’t have a baseline to compare this to. But he realised that this is the first day in ages where he hasn’t gone out to school, to work, or to meet a friend.
Yet, the feeling of loneliness remains alien to him. Or perhaps, he could say that he didn’t feel lonely, but he felt alone.
He misses Michael. He misses Michael so much every day that he thinks this ache is now a permanent part of him. This feeling of incompleteness which will always linger and which he fears will never go away - saudade - he has read on that Internet one day when he stupidly went down a Google rabbit-hole searching for ways to forget someone. As if he ever could.
Adam puts his pen down. He is down to the final pages and he makes a mental note to buy another journal soon. He can’t miss a single day, even if it meant documenting another millennium.
Adam brings himself to the side of his bed in a swift motion practiced daily for almost a year, kneels, and closes his eyes. In an act akin to prayer, he speaks to Michael again.
"I miss you."