Chapter Text
Adam knew he was going mad. He’d long since stopped trying to count the days; every one of them was the same. Lucifer and Michael raged at each other, great rings of fire with eyes like supernovas and wings that stretched across eternity, colliding and fighting with the force of a thousand earthquakes. They clawed equally at the boundaries of the cage and each other, never pausing for a moment’s rest. Their forms filled the cage with blinding light and deafening sound – for the first few years, Adam had spent his time mostly in darkness and silence interspersed with the swift agony of having his eyes burned up and his eardrums blown out every time his body repaired itself. Eventually, he supposed, he must have built up something like immunity. In later years, he could look right at the feuding archangels, and though it hurt like looking into the sun his vision remained intact.
When Lucifer and Michael got bored of each other, they would turn to their human charges. Lucky for Adam, Sam was a stubborn son of a bitch who drew their attention every time. Adam didn’t know how Sam still even had the self-awareness to draw their attention away from his little fuck-up of a half-brother, but every time without fail, when those terrible eyes turned on the human souls sharing their cage, Sam managed to muster up the energy to snarl and scream at them. He’d lost human words ages ago, but Adam thought he might have replaced English with Enochian. Adam couldn’t be sure. He never spoke anything in any language anymore.
At that particular moment, Lucifer and Michael were united in the only game they ever played together: see who could make Sam scream the loudest. Their methods of torture were endlessly inventive, helped along by the fact that Sam’s body always repaired itself no matter how they maimed it. They could dig out his eyes, pluck the skin from his body an inch at a time, drag his intestines out through his belly button and shove them back down his throat to choke on his own guts, and still the magic of the cage fixed it for the Archangels to play with over and over again. If Adam was going mad, surely Sam must have hit madness a long time ago.
Blood dripped down from above, mingled with bits of shredded grace and feathers that burned with ice or fire depending on who they’d been torn off of. The cage floor was always slick with blood and the ugly detritus of archangels at endless war.
That day Adam knew his mind had truly deserted him when something new finally happened. While Lucifer and Michael entertained themselves above him, a strange small creature snuck through a shimmering crack that appeared next to Adam. Adam watched it silently. It smiled at him, which only further confirmed Adam’s belief that it wasn’t real. Nothing real ever smiled in the cage, not unless it was Lucifer and Michael listening to Sam’s screaming and begging.
“What have we here?” the strange creature asked. Adam watched it, not daring to speak even to a hallucination. It was inevitable that with all of eternity, eventually the archangels would get tired of their Winchester and notice Adam one day. He wasn’t eager to hurry that day along. The creature regarded Adam, seemingly oblivious to the chaos and torture occurring above him. “Where are my manners?” it asked, a twinkle in its eyes. “My name is hardly something I’m going to hand out to mortals, but you can call me Puck. I already know who you are, Adam Milligan.” Of course a hallucination would know the name of the person who hallucinated it.
“I had a feeling there was something interesting to see round these parts. Not my usual haunt, but I can’t pass up a feeling.” Puck drew closer to Adam, not minding the silence. “There’s a great deal of chaos coming,” Puck said, lowering his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “We fairy folk like chaos, but only when it’s of our own making. What’s happened and what’s coming is something we aren’t terribly fond of. In the interests of changing things, I’ve come to offer you a deal.” The creature sat down next to Adam and leaned into him. It was strange to feel the touch of someone other than Sam, but Adam found himself leaning into it rather than flinching away. The last few decades, it had been Adam comforting Sam when they were left alone, never the other way around. He missed a comforting touch meant to soothe him. Puck smiled at the action.
“I’m offering you and your brother a way out of here,” Puck said, slipping an arm around Adam’s shoulders and leaning in to whisper in his ear. “All you have to do is say yes. There’s the teensy little price of your soul, but I promise I’ll take better care of it than those idiots up there.” The words wound around Adam like smoke. Puck’s voice was so soft, so kind. Adam nodded. “You have to say it,” Puck reminded him, squeezing gently.
It took some minutes for Adam to find his voice. In the interim, Sam’s screams had grown hoarse and ragged. Adam didn’t want to wonder whether it was because the archangels had done something to his throat, or if Sam had simply grown too exhausted by pain to keep screaming. Instead, he rolled his head onto Puck’s shoulder and examined the face of his would-be savior. Puck’s eyes were bright with mischief, his features sharp and just slightly to the left of human. There was no guarantee that accepting Puck’s deal would lead him to anything better than the life he had in the cage.
There was also little Adam could imagine that would be worse than the life he had in the cage. Besides, Puck had promised to free both him and Sam. Sam had been protecting Adam for so long. Would it really be so awful to return the favor? The archangels had both of them, but Puck only asked for the price of Adam’s soul. The choice was hardly much of a choice, in the end.
“Yes,” Adam said, the word strange and foreign in his ears, and the universe shattered.