With a Whimper

The sensation of weightlessness comforted Adam for only a few brief moments before panic set in and he began the inevitable tumble down to the ground. Adam flailed his arms wildly as he free fell and tried mentally reciting what to do to prevent serious damage to himself: bend the knees, land on your feet, drop and roll once you hit the ground, just don’t drop too hard or you might break an ankle...

His wings were utterly useless, flapping limply behind him, as he had no idea how to use the extra hundred or so new muscles.

Fuck innate knowledge. This was suicide.

And then suddenly, by some miracle, a gust of wind blew through the salvage yard and helped buoy Adam, helping him hover in the air a good five feet from the ground. He stared down at Bobby and the Winchesters wide-eyed before he dropped the rest of the way, landing on his feet lightly. He stumbled to the side a bit, caught off guard again by the heavy unfamiliar weight of his wings, and in doing so he nearly collided with Michael, who suddenly appeared beside him.

“The hell was that?” Bobby demanded angrily as he stormed towards them. “Did you just jump out of the damn house?”

“Yes, Bobby, because I have that high of an expectation of how well I can fly on the first go,” Adam snapped, his feathers unwittingly ruffled in annoyance. He jabbed a finger in Michael’s direction. “This asshole shoved me out.”

“I was simply teaching him how to fly,” Michael said calmly in response to everyone’s looks of incredulity. “In Heaven this was how I taught my brothers and sisters to do so. Their natural instincts would take over and they would learn how to fly almost immediately.”

“Except Adam has no natural instinct with flying. He’s not an angel, Michael, he’s always been a human,” Sam explained, trying to be gently with him. “You can’t just...surprise him like that.”

Michael stood in thought, pondering the situation silently to himself. He wasn’t used to being reprimanded, least of all by a human, and part of him wanted to throw Sam across the yard to teach him respect. On the other hand, when he looked over at Adam, at the pure terror that was still a ghost of an expression on his face, he grudgingly accepted that they were right. Tossing Adam out of a second floor room wasn’t the same as nudging someone like Castiel off of a cloud. Still...

“I didn’t let him hurt himself,” Michael extended by way of a peace offering. “If that stills your anger any.”

Dean narrowed his eyes. “How do you mean?”

“The wind,” Adam breathed, coming to the realization quicker than anyone else. “The wind. That was your doing, wasn’t it?”

Michael nodded slowly, a small smile growing on his face. “You didn’t think I’d simply let you drop like a rock, did you?”

The obvious answer – yes – went unsaid, but Michael didn’t seem offended by everybody’s hesitation. He knew as well as they did that he would be difficult to trust for the time being and so he simply took the fact that they weren’t trying to send him off with a Banishing Sigil as a sign of good faith. It was more than he could’ve asked for, truthfully.

“Oh, well, thank God we have the gracious archangel on our side,” Dean said with a perfectly timed roll of his eyes. He shot Sam a look of pure annoyance before uncrossing his arms and taking long, purposeful strides over to the garage, no doubt where his precious Impala was stored. Bobby shook his head once and followed, and it looked as though Sam wanted to stay behind and say something to Adam and Michael, perhaps give a few words of advice or comfort, but he sensed that the two of them needed to talk and so he hesitantly left them and headed for the house.

Michael took a deep breath and turned to face Adam. “You’re angry,” he guessed.

Adam shrugged one shoulder and felt his wings move with the motion. “That you shoved me out of the second floor without a warning, yeah. But you saved me before I landed, so—”

Michael chuckled unexpectedly and Adam stared. “What’s so funny?”

“I only said that so your brothers wouldn’t make such a fuss over what really happened.” Michael looked at Adam with a little twinkle in his eye. “That was you, Adam, not me. You didn’t fly properly, but you pushed the wind into carrying you so you wouldn’t fall.”

Adam stared at him, heart hammering. “But I don’t know how to...to control the wind.”

“Like I said, I did this to my own siblings in Heaven. It’s a natural instinct.” He grinned. “I told you that you’d pick up on it.”

...Stupid Michael, that arrogant ass.



Apparently it was much easier for Adam to learn to control the elements than it was for him to learn how to operate eight hundred new muscles. By the middle of the week he was able to make it rain indoors, something he tested out by surprising Dean in the middle of his nighttime beer while he sat cozy in the kitchen. The results were satisfactory, and that included Dean’s angry shouting while Adam hid in the basement.

He’d learned to fold his wings back the day before that and was taking full advantage of the fact that he could walk around like a normal person again. It took a lot of concentration and the first time he’d folded his wings into the skin on his back, he’d been so relieved and exhausted that he’d passed out. Michael had been there in an instant, reviving and rejuvenating him with a single touch.

The night Adam learned to fly, he and Michael had the house to themselves. Castiel had been more than distant lately and though Adam had no idea why, he did know that this was the reason that Sam, Dean, and Bobby decided to pack up one night and hit the road without saying exactly where they were going or what they were doing. It seemed that, for all the harping they did on how Adam was part of the family, they still didn’t seem too keen on trusting him. Maybe it had to do with the fact that he was so close to Michael nowadays, and it was him they didn’t trust, as if Adam would turn and divulge all their secrets to his best friend the Prince of Heaven.

It was nearing midnight and Adam and Michael were outside in the salvage yard trying to fly. Michael, of course, was doing so flawlessly, unfolding his brilliant white wings for Adam to see in the moonlight as he flew straight into the air and perched in a nearby tree.

Adam glared up at him from his spot on the ground, hands balled into loose fists at his sides. “Show off.”

Michael chuckled and leaned against a branch with his arms crossed over his chest, ever so casual. “Come up here, then. It’s quite a view.”

“Am I allowed to climb?”

“No. Fly.”

Adam sighed and rolled his shoulders back, cracking his spine a bit as he did so. He always had to limber himself up before unfolding his wings; his body was still unused to the extra weight, ligaments, and muscles, and so if he simply unfolded them without some kind of stretch, he’d be in pain for hours. With a quick ruffle of his feathers, he closed his eyes and squeezed them in concentration, attempting to flap his wings. He didn’t care how ridiculous he looked because he knew Michael wouldn’t tease him about it. If Dean were here, on the other hand, it would be a whole different ballgame.

At first his wings only gave a little shiver and then sort of puttered out when he broke concentration. He tried again, this time dedicating his every thought and brain cell to making his wings flap. He imagined and tried to feel the invisible connection between his wings and his mind, tried to command them to move. When they did, he almost had a heart attack as he left his feet leave the ground and he was airborne for a few seconds before touching back down.

“Did you see that?” Adam asked excitedly. “I mean, I didn’t fly exactly, but I hovered!”

Michael smiled at him from his perch in the tree, his wings outstretched to their full length so he could let them breathe and relax after being stuck in his back for so long. “I saw. That’s good progress, Adam. You just need a little more juice now.”

“A little more juice. Got it.”

He tried again, imagining the weightless feeling from only moments before, and this time it was easier for him to flap his wings and take off at a slow, steady pace, rising from the ground for only inches at first, which then turned into a foot, which turned into a few feet, which...

“Michael,” Adam gasped as he looked down at the ground several feet below him. “I’m actually – whoa!” He lost concentration for a moment and dropped down viciously but regained control. “I’m doing it!”

He was nearly eye-level with Michael in the tree; he only had to fly a few feet higher and he would be able to reach him. He flew towards the tree carefully, angling himself like Superman so he could easily grab onto a branch.

Only problem? He didn’t know yet how to maneuver around tree branches, especially in midair and especially with enormous wings on his back. He tried to fly closer to Michael but his wings kept getting caught on the branches until he somehow managed to get some of the feathers stuck.

“Ow! Fuck, these things are really sensitive,” Adam grumbled as he lighted on a branch and tried turning to detangle his left wing.

“They are as important a part of our bodies as the heart. And yes, they are very sensitive to touch.” Michael jumped down to Adam’s branch gracefully, folding his wings into his back as he did so, so he wouldn’t get tangled too. “Hold on to me.”

Adam frowned but saw where Michael was indicating to his waist. He wrapped an arm around Michael’s waist as the archangel reached up with his left arm to hold onto the upper branch while his right arm extended towards Adam’s stuck wing, working on detangling it singlehandedly. He tried not to let the feathers snag, but on occasion one of them would catch onto twigs and Adam would wince and tighten his grip on Michael’s shirt. Michael couldn’t help but smile a bit as he spoke. “You’re doing very well so far, by the way. I’m surprised you were able to make your way up here so quickly.”

“Yeah, well,” Adam said with a grimace; Michael had untangled another feather, “I pick up on things pretty quickly, believe it or not.”

“Yes, I know that.”

“Oh. Right.”

The whole former vessel thing hadn’t quite sunk into Adam’s mind yet. He forgot that Michael knew him better than anybody – perhaps even better than he knew himself. Lord knows there were things inside Adam’s head that even he didn’t want to go near, but he figured Michael had been inside him for so long that he’d picked and prodded at things untouched for years.

Michael finished detaching the feathers from the branch and Adam immediately folded them back. A great weight was lifted from him as the wings disappeared and fused into his skin, as they were wont to do.

“Better?” Michael asked.

Adam nodded. “Much.”

He was still wrapped around Michael’s waist, his face pressing into his shoulder as he tried not to look down. Now that his wings were folded back, he was scared of falling out of the tree. He hadn’t yet tested pulling his wings out in mid-fall and he wasn’t too keen on trying it now in the dark.

Michael didn’t seemed bothered by the closeness; in fact, he asked, “Would you like to get down?”

Adam nodded fervently and Michael chuckled before grabbing Adam around his hips and leaping from the tree. Adam let out a surprised noise halfway between a gasp and a yelp, but Michael’s wings were out and they simply drifted down to the ground. They released each other once both of Adam’s feet were planted firmly on the ground.

“That wasn’t so bad, was it?” Michael asked with what Adam thought was a teasing grin.

Adam lightly shoved Michael’s shoulder by way of response. “Says you. You’ve been doing this for millennia. It’s easy for you.”

Michael continued to smile and sat down cross-legged on the dirt. Adam hesitated before joining him. It would’ve been nicer to sit inside the house, but it was a cool night and the sky was clear enough where Adam could see the stars above them. He leaned back on his hands and looked up, trying to sound as casual as possible when he asked the question that had been festering in his mind since day one. “Why did you save me?”

Michael pretended not to hear the question, instead opting to look up at the sky as well, but Adam repeated himself louder and the archangel couldn’t pretend any longer.

“I saved you because you were never meant to be down there with me,” Michael said softly, not looking Adam in the eye. “You were a victim of circumstance, Adam. You didn’t deserve any of the horrors you were put through.”

Adam’s jaw tightened. “You abandoned me first,” he said accusingly.

Michael’s gaze snapped from the sky to Adam and he leaned forward, elbows resting on his knees. “Is that what you wish to talk about? How I shed you as a vessel?”

Adam nodded. “You said before that you didn’t do it because I was holding you back, and I can’t think of any other reason for you to just leave my body, so what was it?”

Michael sighed long and hard before he lifted his head and looked Adam in the eyes. “I left you,” he said slowly, carefully, “because I wanted you to be safe.”

There was a brief moment of silence before Adam couldn’t resist the wry chuckle that bubbled up in his throat. “Come on now. Safe? You left me in the Stratum for me to rot!”

“I don’t know what happened to you down there, Adam, and for that I’m truly sorry. I had no idea what kind of horrors I was casting you into, but Lucifer...” Michael sighed and his face darkened at the name, “...Lucifer was attacking you. Attacking us. He’d abandoned Sam as a vessel and was mercilessly charging me while in your body, which was taking almost all of the damage. I thought...I thought that by casting you off as my vessel, I was protecting you from Lucifer.”

If Adam didn’t know any better, he’d say that Michael’s eyes were shinier than usual, filling with the beginnings of tears. Can angels cry? Adam wondered.

He didn’t get a chance to ask; Michael continued. “What did I send you into?” he asked, his voice barely above a whisper.

Adam swallowed hard. He knew they’d have to approach the subject eventually, and it was only Gabriel’s grace that was keeping him from completely falling apart as he sifted through his leftover memories of the Cage and dredged up that one word, that one name that made him scream at night and tremble during the day.

“Toretan. Toretan was there.”

As Adam had expected, the name had no effect on Michael whatsoever. The archangel simply cocked his head to the side slightly, eyebrows furrowed in confusion. “Toretan? What is that?”

“A demon. A filthy, disgusting...” Adam could feel bile in his throat, taste it. He paused and tried to gain control over his churning stomach before continuing. “He lives down in the Stratum. Kind of rules over it, actually. He was down there with me the whole time.”

“And what did this Toretan do to you?”

Adam wrapped his right hand around his left wrist and squeezed tightly, trying to hold himself together as he remembered the white hot pain, heard his own screams echoing in his ears, Toretan’s laughter, the taste of blood and ash in his mouth strong with memory.

“He did what any demon would do to the archangel’s precious vessel. He tortured me.” Adam looked at Michael, blue eyes holding onto the green. “Or, if you wanna get into specifics...he tortured my soul. He...he pulled my soul out of my body, messed with it, cut it up, ripped pieces of it off, and put it all back together and back in my body. Every day. Until you came.”

Michael blanched. “Adam,” he breathed. “I didn’t know...I’m so sorry...” It would’ve been one thing for Toretan to simply rip Adam’s body to pieces on a daily basis, but for the demon to even think about touching Adam’s soul... “I had no idea something like him existed at all, let alone lived down there,” Michael continued quietly, his voice strained and laced with regret. “I would never have abandoned your body had I known...”

Adam nodded absentmindedly, eyes on his shoes. “I know you wouldn’t have. Or at least, I hope not.” The joke was lost when Michael caught his gaze, looking so horribly saddened that Adam likened him to a kicked puppy. “Hey, I’m serious.”

“You have changed,” Michael observed quietly, looking up at Adam through the dark lashes of his fabricated vessel.

Adam cocked an eyebrow. “How so?”

“Two weeks ago you would’ve tried to hit me if I so much as hinted that I’d abandoned you. You did yell at me quite a bit at first. I was wondering if and when physical violence would come into play. But now...” he indicated Adam’s outwardly calm demeanor. “You seem...less angry with me.”

“I spent more than enough time in the Cage being angry with you,” Adam admitted. The taste of bile was slowly fading away and he was able to speak with a clear head. “I was angry with a lot of people in the Cage. You. John Winchester. Sam and Dean. Zachariah. But when I was with Toretan...I dunno. It seemed almost silly to be holding onto those old feelings when there was something bigger in front of me.”

He remembered what Michael had said weeks prior, about Adam not being his primary responsibility. In truth, believing that Adam was always backseat in Michael’s mind was painful, but now it sounded as though that itself had been a lie.

“Michael,” Adam said, choosing his words carefully, “you know you could’ve just let Lucifer rip me apart and left me down there.”

Michael looked appalled at the suggestion. “You say that like you wish that’s what I’d done.”

“No, no, that’s not what I meant,” Adam said with a shake of his head. “I just meant...why did you bother?”

“Saving you?”

“Yeah.”

“Because it was the right thing to do.” Michael spoke as if to a small child.

“Uh-huh. That’s all?”

“That’s all.”

He was lying. Adam knew it, sensed the hesitation in his voice, the little jump in his tone. “Come on, Mike,” he said, reverting to the hated nickname just to tick him off. “You can tell me.”

Michael stared at him blankly. “I do not want to.”

“Tough shit.” He caught the surprised look on Michael’s face but kept going. “You’ve been hiding something from me since day one and I’m not gonna drop it until you tell me what’s going on.”

“I am not obligated to disclose anything to you, Adam, least of all what happened in the Cage that influenced my saving you.”

“As an archangel, no, you’re not obligated. I get that. But as my fucking friend, Michael, you are.”

Michael’s breath hitched in his throat when he heard the word they’d been skipping around since they’d surfaced from Hell together; since they’d first started to ‘sort of’ get along with each other. He never expected Adam to consider him as anything but an archangel, a guardian for when things were looking rough on the outside. The most Michael ever expected them to become was acquaintances, and that in and of itself seemed too close of a term to use in casual conversation. But there it was. Adam had said it first. Friend. They were friends.

It was that single word that loosened Michael’s otherwise stoic exterior. He sighed and tried to unscramble the puzzle of words in his head, threatening to drown him in whatever kind of miserable drivel he’d gotten himself into.

“Adam,” Michael began, “you have to understand...this isn’t something I’d planned on telling you...”

Adam didn’t interrupt, merely sat there as he brought his knees up and wrapped his arms around his legs. It was like Michael was telling him some kind of twisted bedtime story filled with all the demons and creatures that they’d tried so hard to leave behind in the Cage. But that was impossible, wasn’t it? The Cage was inside them, in both of them, and there was no amount of grace that could fully heal or fix the wounds that it left behind on them. Forever scarred, somewhat fixed, but the cracks would always show and there was no way to completely cover them up.

But that was the nice thing about this, wasn’t it? It was having two broken things put together to make one whole broken thing. Because then, and at least then, they would always have each other.

Michael realized all of this and suddenly feared that what he had been about to say could ruin everything. What Adam had just called a friendship between them Michael was happy to acknowledge, but it could so easily be damaged by a few simple words.

Adam raised an eyebrow when Michael didn’t continue. “Mike? You okay there?”

The archangel snapped back to reality with the blink of an eye. “We are friends, Adam, yes?” The human nodded slowly and Michael tried to put on his best poker face. “Then that is why I saved you.”

“Oh, come on,” Adam snapped. “That’s such bullshit.”

“Is it?” Michael could feel his cheeks burning with red frustration. Why couldn’t he just take things at face value and leave well enough alone? Damn Winchester genetics...

“It is. We both know there’s something more to it than that. I wouldn’t even do that for a best friend, let alone a friend. Besides, we weren’t exactly on the best of terms at that point, remember? We were separated.”

“I couldn’t just leave my vessel down there.” Michael tried another approach – that of the dutiful soldier who was obligated to drag his equipment around wherever he went.

Adam didn’t fall for that either. “Are we seriously gonna play twenty questions? Or can you just man up and tell me the truth?”

When Michael looked into Adam’s eyes, genuine hurt was there, pain at the thought that Adam didn’t deserve the truth from someone whom he’d just called a friend. And it broke Michael.

“I saved you because you are...special,” Michael amended at the last second.

Adam stared. “Special,” he repeated monotonously. “You saved me because I was special.”

“Are special, Adam. Not past tense. You never stopped.”

Adam rolled his eyes. “You angels are so sappy. That still doesn’t explain anything.”

“How do you mean?”

“What makes me special? What made me so goddamn different that you’d risk attack from Lucifer to break me out with you? That you wouldn’t dare drop me or leave me behind when it was convenient for you to just let me go?”

Michael shook his head. “I’d rather not—”

“Well, you are.”

Michael growled a little and shot to his feet so quickly Adam almost got whiplash trying to follow the motion with his head. “I do not have to sit here and take this. I’ll be in the house if you need me.”

He turned around purposefully, heels digging into the dirt and crushing the pebbles underneath his shoes as he stormed towards Bobby’s house. Adam chased after him, calling out, “Hey, Michael! Dickwad, come back here!”

He reached the archangel before he could ascend the porch steps and grabbed onto Michael’s elbow. “Michael, come on—”

Michael whirled around with such force that Adam flinched backwards, face scrunched up as he prepared for a blow to the face. He’d already witnessed Michael’s anger once before when he merely verbally goaded him on; touching him was probably worth a good roundhouse kick into the nearest vehicle.

The resulting kiss was hard and rough and unexpected, with Michael’s lips moving against Adam’s so fervently that Adam thought his mouth had caught fire. His eyes widened and his hands scrambled to grab Michael’s shoulders to shove him away, but when Michael angled his head down to deepen the kiss and opened his mouth slightly and the first moan ripped from Adam’s throat, he could only grasp at the shirt material with his fingers and hold on with a white-knuckled grip. Michael’s hands found their way around Adam’s slim waist and slipped under his shirt, fingers digging into the small of his back as he gripped him tight, and Adam’s hands moved up from the archangel’s shirt to his neck where he caressed gently, a stark contrast to the violence of the kiss.

Adam had no idea what the hell was going on. Not that he actually cared at the moment.

...Fuck, Michael was a good kisser.