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Title: Mother of Angels
Author: Evandar
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Angst/Romance
Pairings: Michael/Adam
Warning: M-Preg
Disclaimer: I do not own Supernatural and am making no profit from this story.
Summary: Adam wakes up one morning in Windom instead of the Cage. Life is good and his Mom is alive - it’s like nothing ever happened. Except, his stomach keeps cramping and he feels sick in the mornings, and Michael isn’t answering his (rather terrible) prayers. He’s alone, lost, and he thinks he might be pregnant. Clearly, a road trip is in order.
Author's Notes: This was written for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
spnmpregbb and is just long enough to hit the 10k track. Thank you so much to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
2people2 for the wonderful beta work, and to minions4pie for signing up to be my artist and creating some absolutely beautiful pieces inspired by this fic - they can be found here at her journal, so go take a look! Thanks also to R for her patience in acting as a sounding board and for fangirling over SPN with me, and to yohkobennington for running a great bang.
I've never been to any of the places mentioned in this fic, so please excuse any inaccuracies - I did what I could with Google Images.
First Trimester
When he wakes up every morning, he expects the world to change. He expects the familiar walls of his bedroom to change to some kind of nightmare world. He expects to see his Mom ripped apart by those monsters again; for blood to drip down the walls and the Devil in his half-brother’s body to set the world on fire. He expects Michael, whether in the form of white-red light as he prays and rages and despairs, or in the form of a dark-haired man.
Michael never comes. Sometimes, Adam tries praying, but for all that he was possessed by an archangel, he’s never been religious and it comes out as half of an awkward conversation. He stops, embarrassed, before he can say anything that might have an actual meaning. There are so many things that he could say; should say. Michael, for all he was kind of a dick – and Adam suspects that that’s kind of a species trait – did help him, down in the Cage. He sheltered him from the worst of it. Wrapped him in light and wings the colour of blood, and took the brunt of Hell’s worst punishment on himself.
So Adam prays, uncomfortably, and Michael never comes and the world never melts away into terror. It’s real. He’s really somehow – miraculously – alive again. He doesn’t understand it, but he’s not ungrateful.
He’s got his Mom back. He’s got a full-ride at college when he starts again in the fall, and the memories of the last year – the year he was dead or possessed – seem to have been wiped from everyone around him. Hell, his professors think he’s taken the year off for ‘personal reasons’. It’s a clean slate. One he’s trying to make the most of.
He supposes that, since he was presumably returned to life by God – and damn doesn’t that sound arrogant – that he should start going to church and bake sales and fundraisers and start practising religion. Only, from what he remembers of having Michael inside him, the whole religion thing is more personal than scraping money together for a new church roof. And, as mentioned, he’s not great at praying. Like, on his knees with his hands clasped and actually saying “thanks dude” and being mortified by his own stupidity kind of not great. ‘Not great’ is probably an understatement, actually.
So he doesn’t go to church. No change there. He does volunteer at an animal shelter, but that’s more because the kittens are adorable balls of crazy and because animals are easier to talk to than people… or angels.
He wakes up every morning to blue walls and childhood posters and the sinking feeling that the other shoe is going to drop sometime soon. Then he hears his Mom humming if she’s up and in the kitchen, or finds a note taped to the fridge door with her shift pattern on it, and he realises that it’s not going to. So he’ll either join his Mom for breakfast or make something for himself, and he’ll get on with his life because he damn well has one.
He looks up angelic lore. He learns how to shoot a gun and starts jogging round the neighbourhood. He reads books on demons and werewolves and finds a weird series about his half-brothers that’s got scary-ass fangirls and a small following of people who call it the Winchester Gospel, like it’s part of the Bible or something. He supposes that it might be; their lives certainly seemed to revolve around angels and demons and the Devil enough for it to be true. He reads the books, reads some of the fanfics for shits and giggles and then wishes he hadn’t, and he resolves never to get involved with Sam and Dean like ever again. He’s going to use this second chance to take advantage of his full-ride, graduate school and become a doctor, and he’s going to help people. Granted, it’s what he was planning on doing anyway, which may be kind of a cop-out, but hey; it’s what he wants to do. And if he uses his knowledge of hunters to sometimes help them on the sly someday? Well… that’ll be his business.
He’s so fucking determined to put everything behind him that he doesn’t notice when the memories of the Cage start to fade from an ever-present fear of unimaginable horrors, to something calmer. Something his human brain can process without wanting to implode. His memories of Michael’s true form become less mind-burningly bright. Sam’s echoing screams fade to whispers and Lucifer’s fury is reduced to embers. He remembers Michael with black hair and a handsome face and an illusion of red wings arching from the back of a leather jacket.
When he realises that he’s forgetting the enormity of Michael’s true form and the way his grace felt as it buzzed around the edges of his soul, he’s so freaked out that he tries praying again. It’s a brief experiment that leaves him feeling like he should just go bury himself in the backyard or something. He doesn’t pray again until he gets sick.
It starts off small. He’s tired all the damn time. His Mom presses the back of her hand to his forehead and frowns when she doesn’t find a temperature and he’s still in bed at 2pm; she mutters something uncomplimentary about teenagers under her breath and threatens him with a glass of cold water dumped on his head unless he gets himself up. He doesn’t risk her wrath further, and he has to start dragging himself out from under the covers every day to stop her from getting mad.
He saw her get eaten, damn it. He doesn’t want her mad at him.
It doesn’t stop there. He gets stomach cramps. Bad ones that grip his lower belly at the worst moments and make him think he’s going to shit himself in public. But it’s when his nipples start to darken and grow so sensitive that a T-Shirt becomes uncomfortable, he stops thinking ‘indigestion’ and starts thinking ‘what the fuck?’ instead.
Two months after he woke up to find himself alive and whole in his bedroom, he goes to church.
It’s his local Catholic place. It’s all pale bricks and a red roof with stained glass windows, and it has a sign outside that says that Jesus loves him. He picks it because it’s close – it’s within walking distance of his house, and he hasn’t felt like driving lately; he gets claustrophobic every time the door slams shut. It’s nice and cool inside, and gratifyingly empty. No one around to see him make an idiot of himself except the angels in the windows and the plaster Jesus they have hanging over the altar.
He spots an image of Michael; an image of what’s supposed to be Michael. He’s more drawn to it than he wants to be, and sits in the pool of red light cast by the sun glaring through his stained glass robes. Window-Michael is blond and white-winged and nothing at all like the real deal, but there’s a serenity to his face that makes Adam feel like somehow, something’s going to make sense someday.
Still, he wonders what the priest would say if he told him the artist had it wrong: that it was Lucifer’s wings that were white and that they shone brighter than the sun even as he plummeted down into the Cage. It doesn’t bear thinking about. Besides, he’s procrastinating.
He shifts on his pew, folds his hands in his lap, and bows his head.
He feels like there’s supposed to be some sort of reaction. Like he’s supposed to feel warm and peaceful like the weight of God’s attention is on him. He feels stupid.
“Hi,” he says, grateful once more that the church is empty. He looks at his hands with the ragged skin around his nails; past them to his feet, and he flexes his toes around the spokes of his flip-flop straps. He sighs. Tries again. “Hey Michael.”
He looks up at the window and the kind, peaceful face – bland, he thinks – and thinks back to the Cage, tries to capture the image of Michael’s true self in his mind’s eye and fails. He settles for the black-haired vessel, whoever that was; he never had been told who else the archangel had worn.
“So I’m fine, I guess. I mean, I’m trying to keep busy and my textbooks say I probably have pancreatitis so I should kind of see a doctor. Uh.” He clears his throat. “Did you get out? When I did, I mean. Was that God? ‘Cause no offense or anything, but to take me out of there just to leave you behind would be shitty. And taking me out of there to kill me off with a crappy disease is shittier. Uh.”
He’s probably not supposed to swear in church, least of all when aiming it at God. Well, it’s too late for that now.
“I hope you’re free somewhere and not planning to destroy the world or anything,” he says. “You were good, you know? To me, I mean. You didn’t have to be. I’m like, an ant or something by comparison, so you didn’t have to be that good to me but you were and I – I want to thank you for that. I should have thanked you months ago, but I’m bad at this. Really bad. You can, uh, probably tell. I – “
He takes a deep breath. Long and slow, and tries to pretend that his eyes aren’t beginning to water.
“I miss you,” he says.
He signs off with an “amen” because that’s what he’s been told you do when you pray, even though it makes him feel more ridiculous than the opening salvo of “hi”. He stands carefully, hand flying to his stomach when as a sudden cramp almost brings him to his knees. “Damn it,” he mutters.
When the pain fades, he looks up at the window again. “Give me a sign, okay?” he says, because “amen” is for losers. “Let me know, somehow, if you’re out. It’d be good to see you again, you know.”
Again, he feels nothing except the residual pain left in his belly and a vague sense of – presumably – internal disapproval. The sense that he has no idea what he’s doing, but that he’s definitely doing it wrong.
He mutters to himself on the way out of the door. “Life would be easier if angels had cell phones,” and steps back out into the summer heat.
It’s April, so it’s not really summer, but it’s swelteringly hot – unusually so for Minnesota, and the walk home has him sweating. His Mom’s back when he arrives, on the stairs with a basket of laundry on her hip. She gives him the oddest look when he walks in.
“Adam? Are you okay, honey?”
Words stick on his tongue. He shrugs. “Yeah, why?”
“You’re holding your stomach,” she tells him, and he moves his hand away from his abdomen. He hadn’t even realised he was doing it. She walks down the stairs a bit quicker, and she presses her hand to his forehead again. “Are you sick?”
According to his medical textbooks, he is. Very sick. As in, should go to hospital sick. But he doesn’t feel it. Yeah, the cramps are damn uncomfortable, but he’s not shitting or vomiting blood so he figures it’s not all that bad; the tiredness is a pain in the ass, but again, probably not fatal. It’s weird. He’s sick, kind of, and he knows that he has to be, but for some reason he just doesn’t feel it.
“Nah, I’m fine,” he tells her, leaning in to press a kiss to her cheek. “I’m just hungry.” He’s nothing of the sort, but it is believable. And he should probably eat or something at some point, but all he really wants to do is curl up in bed with a terrible book or a window open on MoreThanBrothers.net so that he can laugh at his half-brothers’ man-pain while pretending that they’re fictional characters who didn’t abandon him in Hell.
He shakes his head as he walks through to the kitchen. There’s a part of him that thinks he’s losing his damn mind. There’s a part of him that wants to forget that he died, forget Heaven and Hell and Michael, and relegate all of that to ‘crazy-ass dream’ territory, but he can’t. Mostly because while his death was horrible, and Hell was a million times worse, forgetting Michael is the last thing that he wants to do.
He curls up with his laptop later, a peanut butter and sausage sandwich on a plate by his elbow, and a tab open on Samlicker81’s latest traumatic offering to the world of online pornography. But in another tab, he’s looking up prayers to Michael – the proper, official-type churchy ones, so that next time he can do it better.
He chews thoughtfully on his sandwich. There shouldn’t be a next time, not really, but somehow he already knows that there will be.
Second Trimester
Saint Michael the Archangel,
loyal champion of God and His People.
I turn to you with confidence
and seek your powerful intercession.
His new obsession with peanut butter on everything is beginning to get worrying. There’s a slight thickening of his waist that none of his half-hearted jogging can seem to work off and his nipples are so damn sore that they’re starting to swell and puff up; the smell of bacon in the mornings makes him feel sick – sometimes even be sick, which is getting kind of hard to keep from his Mom – but peanut butter goes with everything now. Especially sausage. And olives. He doesn’t even like olives.
He’s taken to walking or jogging everywhere despite the soaring temperatures because the car still makes him feel nervous and because it’s healthy. It’s not healthy that he has to wear a thicker T-Shirt than normal to hide his swollen nipples, and he ends up drinking Gatorade by the gallon. He tells himself that’s why he needs to pee all the time and that it’s not because of his weird-ass medical condition that’s definitely not pancreatitis.
He stops by the church on his way home from the animal shelter every day so he can talk to Michael. It’s really more like ranting at Michael: he’s learned the proper prayers and stuff, but he rarely ever uses them; all the fancy titles seem a little over the top when you’re talking to the guy who wore you like a tux. The vicar’s starting to recognise him. He’s seen him a few times, and he keeps trying to get Adam to come to an actual service instead of sitting and muttering at a window – Adam’s version of praying still leaves a lot to be desired, he just has less shame about the whole thing.
“So yeah,” he tells Michael, “peanut butter is definitely not diet food, and I’m getting a bit chunky. Ever hear of a chunky Winchester? I mean, I know I was pretty much your last resort and all, but damn am I not fine in comparison.”
There’s a calm silence in response, accompanied by a sense of amusement. If Adam hadn’t known for a fact that Michael had no sense of humour, he would have accused the archangel of laughing at him. But they got to know each other in the Cage, and he knows that Michael wouldn’t, if only because he doesn’t laugh at anything. It’s probably internalised. He still thinks he’s kind of dumb for doing this.
And besides, if the wild theory that he’s beginning to consider is right, then it’s really not funny at all, no matter how badly he words it.
“I’m going to the bookstore later,” he says. “The next part of the Winchester Gospel –“ he punctuates that, as always, with a snort “-is being released, so. Yeah. Even though I kind of have spoilers for the ending, I’m going to buy it. Someone’s gotta help fund the author’s alcohol habit, right?”
He stands, runs his hand through his hair and then drops it to rest on his belly. “Hope you’re okay,” he says. “Let me know sometime, okay? You know, whenever you decide to get off your cloud and answer. It’s not like I don’t know you’re real. See ya, Michael.”
There’s a nerdy-type bookstore in the middle of town, and that’s where he heads when he’s finished. He wasn’t joking about Supernatural; the next book, Lazarus Rising is being released today and he has every intention of getting it. If only because - spoilers - the relationship between Dean and Castiel is something the fangirls are going to go wild for.
He wonders what kind of person that makes him, that he reads amateur porn about his half-brothers. Weird, definitely. Fourth-wall breakingly weird.
The Adam before he died would never have set foot in this place. It’s unnecessarily dark and cluttered, and populated by guys who speak in monotone voices. But it’s the only local store that carries Carver Edlund’s terrible writing and Amazon’s made of evil, so it’s there that he goes, ducking his head in case anyone he went to school with spots him. It’s a vain and futile effort; the guy behind the counter was in his AP Maths class. He’s called Jerry, and he’s actually kind of cool apart from the fact that he knows Adam’s dirty secret.
“Hey Adam,” he says. “You here for your order?”
Adam nods and grimaces slightly; wincing when he’s handed a mass market paperback with a half-naked artist’s impression of Dean on the cover. He’s pouting, thumbs tucked into the waist of his jeans. There are the shadows of wings spread out behind him. It’s the most gloriously tacky thing that Adam’s ever held.
“You’re really into this stuff, huh?” Jerry asks. “You know they got a convention?”
“I’ve heard,” Adam says, pulling out his wallet and shoving some crumpled bills over, trying to look as reluctant as possible. “Apparently there were ghosts at the first one.”
Jerry snickers. “Great advertising, right?” He doesn’t believe in ghosts and shit because, unlike Adam, his life is gloriously sane and normal.
Adam makes a noise that may have been a laugh at some point, and watches as Dean’s rippling abs are wrapped in brown paper and sealed with a sticker. He’s feeling weird again. Light-headed and fuzzy, so he leans against the counter and listens to Jerry babble until he feels something wet on his top lip and the narrative of how Carver Edlund really sucks at public speaking falters.
“Dude, you’re bleeding,” Jerry says.
He raises a hand to his face, brushes his fingers under his nose and comes away with a smear of blood on his fingers the same colour as Michael’s wings. His heart pounds in his chest. “Shit,” he breathes.
He’s panicking. For some reason he doesn’t understand, it’s definitely panic that’s making his hands tremble as he accepts a tissue from Jerry. Why is he panicking? It’s a damn nosebleed. He’s not bothered by blood, he’s had them before plenty of times; why is this one different?
His theory. The one he’s been mentally poking with a stick for the last month, rises like some kind of mythical beast from the murky depths of his subconscious. He swallows reflexively and tastes metal on his tongue. No. No no no no no. He is not going to pass out. He’s not p-
The world swims and he closes his eyes. Jerry’s chirping of “Adam? Adam, are you okay?” fades into white noise as memories of the Cage swim through his head. Memories of red wings and feathers the size of his own body; of a voice so deep it made his bones shake; peace found in an impenetrable embrace. He remembers Michael taking a human form and exploring his memories with resolution and confusion – entering them to dispel the illusions created by the Cage, but staying to explore what his Father’s greatest creations had made of the world; he remembers Michael in his classes, in his dorm room, in his bed. The press of the archangel entering him and the curious light in his green eyes. He remembers watching Riverfest fireworks with wings wrapped around him and introducing Michael to barbecue ribs on the Fourth of July.
He remembers falling in love and having it snatched away again.
“Adam?”
“I’m fine,” he says. “Sorry. Just dizzy.”
Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. He needs to get out. He needs to go and find an archangel and pluck him like a freaking turkey because God damn it, he’s standing in a comic book store and he’s just realised he’s pregnant.
He needs so much help, it’s unreal. But how the fuck does a pregnant guy get help without being dissected?
He blows Jerry off with a “see you later” and heads out of the door, back the route he came, and up the steps into the church. “You son of a bitch,” he tells the window. “You absolute son of a bitch.” There’s people around for once and he’s definitely not mumbling this time, and he’s peripherally aware of the shocked looks he gets from pearl-clutchers on his way back out, but he’s so past caring that it’s not even funny. Most of them probably follow the Hallmark-angel train of thought anyway, which shows what they know.
He makes it home in record time, sweating through his T-Shirt and panting. His Mom’s thankfully not around to see him tear around the house like a lunatic, packing a duffel bag and swearing like a sailor. The first vestiges of a plan are forming in his head, triggered when he throws Lazarus Rising onto his bed.
He’s not going to get involved with Sam and Dean again. They can go fuck themselves – or each other, whatever – but they’re not the only hunters out there, and Supernatural did provide an almost complete address for the one guy in the whole Anti-Apocalypse brigade with a functioning brain.
He’s going to South Dakota.
It’s the feel of sweat dripping down his spine and a cramping in his belly that slows him down. He looks at the bombsite that he’s made of his room and grimaces, strips off his shirt and heads for the shower. He needs to be clean. He needs to think.
He catches sight of his reflection in the bathroom mirror. He’s pale and mad-looking with wide eyes and his hair sticking up all over the place, and his puffy nipples make him cringe. He touches them, winces, and slides his hands downwards to cover his belly. His baby. Aside from the slight thickening, there’s no visible difference. There’s no way that what he’s thinking is even possible, but he’s seen a lot of things lately that aren’t supposed to be possible, so what’s one more?
“Michael,” he whispers, “if you’re not listening, you might want to start.” He takes a deep breath. “I really need your help.”
He tells himself that this is as close as he’ll ever come to begging, but he knows it’s a lie. He’s going to beg. He’s going to scream. He’s possibly even going to die – the male body isn’t supposed to be able to do what his apparently is, and it sure as Hell explains all the cramping. His internal organs are already getting squashed as they’re being pushed aside by his – womb? He has a womb now?
He can’t take looking at his reflection any more. He steps in the shower and lets the water wash away his sweat and his frustration. Stepping out, he wishes he’d held on to the latter, at least; all that’s left is a cold ball of fear that settles low in his chest. He’s never going to be able to explain this. Not to his Mom; not to anyone.
He needs to go.
He leaves his Mom a note, telling her that he’s gone on a road trip and he doesn’t know when he’ll be back. That he needs some space for a while. It’s going to send her into a panic, but he doesn’t know what else to tell her. Certainly not the truth. Then he throws his bag in the passenger side of his car and slides behind the wheel for the first time in months.
The seatbelt is an unwelcome pressure against his abdomen, and the walls and roof seem to press down on him, but he’s definitely not walking to South Dakota. So he rolls the windows all the way down and backs up off the drive, throws his baby – hah – in gear, and puts his foot down.
It’s been four months since he was let out of the Cage. He figures from his symptoms that he’s been pregnant for around the same amount of time. He doubts he’s going to make it to term, so he’s halfway through already.
Sioux Falls suddenly seems too far away.
For the love of God,
Who made you so glorious in grace and power,
and for the love of the Mother of Jesus, the Queen of the Angels,
be pleased to hear our prayer.
By the time he gets there, a little over an hour and a half later, Sioux Falls seems entirely too close, and it’s dawned on him that he has no idea if this Bobby Singer guy survived the showdown in Stull, or even if he can help him in the first place. That, and he has no idea where the guy’s salvage yard actually is. He’s been there before, he knows that, but in his defence, he’d just been resurrected at the time and that would screw anyone’s mind up.
He stops in town for a bathroom break. Makes his way to the local diner and gets something depressingly un-caffeinated to drink – he figures that angel-baby hasn’t had too much harm done so far, but doesn’t want to make it worse – and to ask for directions. Fortunately, Bobby Singer has a bit of a reputation for being the town whacko when he’s not being handy with a wrench, so the waitress has no problem writing those directions onto a napkin for him. No problem in flipping the napkin over and writing her number on the other side, either, and once upon a time, Adam might have taken her up on that.
Instead, he tips her and heads back to his car without letting his eyes stray too far beyond her name tag - Amber B - and sips his Sprite all the way out along the road to Singer Salvage Yard.
He doesn’t remember much of the place. He only stayed briefly, and he’d fled the place at night, so he hadn’t realised just how large Bobby Singer’s place was. Surrounded by stacks of rusted cars and old tyres, the house is pretty much hidden from the road; its boarded walls decorated with old hubcaps.
Adam pulls up in the front yard and parks, gets out before he can change his mind and stretches. Regardless of what’s going to happen next, he’s glad to be out of the damn car. He peers up at the dark windows and offers a quick prayer up to Michael that someone’s in, and while he’s pretty sure by this point that Michael’s not listening, it does make him feel a little bit better. He might be getting the hang of it, he thinks, as he makes his way up the porch steps.
He catches sight of salt by the windows. There’s an iron horseshoe over the door and a devil’s trap carved into the porch roof. Bobby Singer is paranoid as all Hell. Clearly.
He raises his hand and knocks before he can hesitate any more than he already has. The wait afterwards, though, is nothing less than excruciating: his brain coming up with every single reason he’s already thought of for why this is a stupid idea and reminding him of them. But then the door opens, revealing the barrel of a shotgun and a rugged face he vaguely remembers from an age ago.
“Uh, hi,” he says, and is momentarily appalled that he’s just as awkward around real people as he is in churches.
He sees Singer’s eyes flick up to the devil’s trap. There’s a pause, and then there’s a thud on the other side of the door and agony spiralling through his stomach. He gasps and folds in half; his hands grasp at his stomach as he tries desperately to protect the life within him. “Stop it,” he says, but it comes out as more of a sob as something in his belly twists. “Stop.” He doesn’t care that he’s begging; it’s the most pain he’s been in since the Cage and he wants it to be over.
The pain eases, but there’re black spots dancing in front of his eyes. He’s struggling to breathe when the door opens wider and Singer hauls him into the house by his bicep.
When he comes to, he’s on a couch. A familiar couch, since he’s been in this position on it before, but one that’s surrounded by more Enochian sigils than he thought possible. Apparently, he’s been unconscious long enough for Singer to do some redecorating.
The room he’s in is filled with books and dust, and Singer’s with him, watching him with the shotgun across his lap. “Whatever you did, please don’t do it again,” he says, struggling to sit up. A wave of dizziness hits, and he ends up slumping back onto the couch twice before he manages to haul himself upright.
“Angel banishing sigil,” Singer says. “Last time I saw you, boy, you were possessed by Michael.”
His baby’s hurt by banishing sigils? Good to know for the future. He draws his knees up to his chest and hugs them. “I’m not anymore,” he says. “We separated when we were dragged into the Cage. He protected me in there, but…I got out four months ago. I don’t know where Michael is; if he’s down there, or somewhere else.”
Singer nods, but Adam’s pretty sure that he doesn’t believe him. He wouldn’t, and Singer’s paranoid enough for the both of them.
“Got a drink?” he asks, mostly to break the silence.
He’s pretty sure that what he’s handed is holy water. He sips it anyway. It’s warm and faintly metallic, but it’s good. It soothes his throat, and gives him something to do that isn’t stare at the check pattern on Singer’s shirt or the books on his shelves. Even though some of them look pretty fascinating, and he’d love to take a closer look, it’s not why he’s here.
He waits for Singer to ask, though. He’s not just going to launch into his explanations – he’s going to sound enough like a lunatic as it is.
“That sigil wouldn’t have hurt you if you were human,” Singer says when the silence grows awkward again. “So what the Hell are you?”
“Human,” he replies. “I’m human, I promise. It’s just… Michael left something behind, I think. We, er, got close in the Cage, you know? And –“
And he’s definitely sounding like a lunatic. It’s about to get worse. He takes a sip of water in an attempt to steel his nerves, curses Michael six ways in his head, and takes a deep breath. “We got close in the Cage,” he says again. “And now I’m pregnant. And I have no idea what to do, so I came here for help, because I figured you’re already used to this supernatural bullshit anyway.”
He waits for the full effect of his words to sink in. Singer’s horrified expression is a thing of beauty.
“So, yeah. Sorry to just crash in like this, but I’m kind of desperate.”
There’s honestly not much more that he can say than that. He could babble, and God, the words are just building up on his tongue ready to spill out. He could go on for hours about Michael and the Cage and how frustrated and angry and scared he is, but there’s no way in Hell that he’s going to unleash that much straight off – not to a guy who works with his brothers and didn’t intervene when they abandoned him down there.
Besides, it looks like Singer’s in shock. He clears his throat, swallows his outrage, and asks, “Are you okay, man?”
Singer looks at him like he’s lost his mind. Adam supposes it’s not an unreasonable reaction. But instead of calling him out on it, Singer just huffs something about needing a damn drink and puts the shotgun down. “You coming, idjit?” he asks as he stands.
“Sure,” Adam replies. “Got anything non-alcoholic?”
You know the value of our souls in the eyes of God.
May no stain of evil ever disfigure its beauty.
Once Singer has him set up in a spare room with clean sheets on a previously dusty bed, Adam installs himself in the guy’s impressive library and researches angels. It’s both ridiculously easy – Singer has more books on the subject than Adam had realised existed – and hard, much for the same reason. He ploughs his way through the Bible, the Qur’an, and the Torah. He reads rarer gospels too, like the Book of Enoch, and studies Sumerian and Egyptian accounts with dictionaries balanced, open, on his swelling stomach.
He finds the story of the nephilim fairly early on, and he keeps coming back to it – to the story of the watcher angels and their giant children, destroyed mercilessly in Noah’s flood. He’s not entirely sure what the difference between an archangel and a watcher angel is beyond power level, but he learns that some of them were kicked out for having their weirdo angel-human children against God’s will. Or something. It’s probably not entirely accurate, but it’s not comforting either. Not when he has one of those angel-human hybrids growing inside of him and shoving his internal organs out of its way.
If one of the reasons the flood was sent was to destroy the nephilim, then his kid? Probably fucked. Like, from before birth. He’s half a Winchester, and his luck’s been pretty crappy so far.
He spends his time drifting between his room, the library, and the kitchen. Singer leaves him to himself, for the most part; Adam pays his rent on time and helps out with research every so often in exchange for Singer’s hospitality. He doesn’t cook, except for himself. His taste buds have gone completely nuts, and his pregnancy cravings have hit with a vengeance.
He’s halfway through a tuna and peanut butter sandwich and his fifteenth reread of the Book of Enoch when there’s a rumble of a car engine from outside, and he peers out of the window in time to see a sleek Chevy Impala pull up next to his own, abandoned, vehicle. It’s too familiar – it’s the car he learned to drive in; it’s the car his brothers grew up in. The doors creak and slam as they climb out, bundled up in denim, leather, and flannel, and Adam feels something like rage burn inside of him. They look exactly as they always did. They escaped, unscathed, and left him behind to burn. He’s under no illusions at all that his time in the Cage could have been infinitely different had Michael not developed some kind of empathy for him; had they not come to know each other so intimately over the millennia of Hell-time that they’d been down there together.
He’s lost his appetite. He hears the door slam downstairs and levers himself from his chair with a sigh, abandoning his sandwich in favour of biting the bullet and going downstairs. He’s not dumb enough to think that Singer won’t have told them.
His belly cramps as he stands, and there’s a soft fluttering that he’s starting to think is his baby moving. It’s been happening more and more often, and while he can’t feel it when he presses his hand over his stretched skin, he can definitely feel it inside of him. His little angel-baby is live and presumably kicking. Or flapping. Or both.
He climbs down the stairs as carefully and quietly as he can and pushes open the door to Singer’s living room. His half-brothers… They kind of fill what little space is left between the furniture and the stacks of books and papers. Singer looks at him when he walks in, and his brothers turn, and the room goes so quiet that Adam knows he was right about being the topic of conversation.
Worse, his T-Shirts don’t hide the worst of the baby bump any more. He’s not sure exactly what they’re thinking as they stand there staring at him, but there’s definitely anger in the set of Dean’s jaw and a kind of hollow grief in Sam’s eyes. Taking a wild guess, he – and his baby – are just one more supernatural fuck-up in a long, long history of supernatural fuck-ups, and they aren’t sure whether to mourn him or shoot him.
He glances towards Singer again, and knows he’ll have no help from that quarter. The guy’s a good man but his loyalty is to the Winchesters, not John’s bastard. It was good while it lasted, but Adam knows he’s outstayed his welcome.
He just wishes he knew what the fuck he’s supposed to do next.
Help us to conquer the evil spirit who tempts us.
“This isn’t possible,” Dean mutters. He’s pacing the living room, wooden floors creaking under his boots, and watching him is making Adam dizzy. He doesn’t want to take his eyes off him, though. He can’t see Dean as anything other than a threat. Sam, either, though his other brother isn’t pacing – he’s just staring between Dean and Adam with a lost expression on his face.
“I mean, you’re a dude. Dudes don’t get knocked up,” Dean continues.
“Tell that to Michael,” Adam grumbles, because it’s something still he doesn’t understand either.
“Yeah,” Dean says. “Him. He out of the box too?”
Adam shrugs. “No idea.” He tucks his feet up onto the chair so that he can wrap his arms around his knees. Angel-baby shifts again inside of him, and he likes to think that it’s because it’s heard its father’s name. He hasn’t noticed a pattern, or anything, and he holds no illusions about Michael ever actually turning up and being a parent because that’s something that just doesn’t happen to Milligans. Like, ever. But still. He likes to think it.
“It’s not like I even know how I got out,” he says. “My best guess is God, but, yeah. Not exactly sure why He’d step in to bail me.”
Dean snorts, and that’s apparently that.
Sam cuts in. “I don’t remember you and Michael being close enough for, uh, this. When you were down there.”
Adam shrugs again. “He stopped possessing me pretty much immediately, but he never left,” he says, picking at a loose thread on the knee of his jeans. “I heard you screaming, and I saw Lucifer a couple of times, but Michael was just there, you know? I think he felt guilty or something.”
“But he-“
“The Cage makes you hallucinate,” Adam tells him. “Quoth the archangel.”
Sam opens his mouth as if to argue, but Adam’s not interested. He shifts. He likes this position, really, but damn if the baby bump doesn’t get in the way. And besides, awkward reunions suck for everyone.
“Look,” he says as he clambers to his feet. “There’s nothing more than that to tell you, and the kid’s mine. Nothing to do with you – Hell, we’re barely even family. So, yeah. Just pretend like I’m not here and I’ll make it happen.”
He looks at Singer and smiles; he really is a decent guy. “Thanks,” he says. “For everything.”
“Wait a minute, you’re leaving?” Dean asks.
“Pretty much,” he replies. He meets Dean’s eyes and he doesn’t like what he sees there. The panic and the fear all feel too much like an attempt to take control, and he smiles to try and take the sting out of what he has to say – or to make it worse. He’s not too sure of that. “I don’t trust you around my kid.”
Dean flinches, but when Adam goes to leave, he doesn’t stop him. No one stops him; not while he’s packing or while he’s lugging his duffel bag down to his car. He glances back long enough to see three pale faces in the window, and he knows that he’s going to pay for this somehow. That somewhere down the line, something’s going to come along and bite him on the ass, all because he told Dean Winchester ‘no’. Probably.
He pulls out of Singer Salvage Yard, picks a direction, and drives.
Third Trimester
He’s been in Illinois for six weeks when he’s discovered. He’s freaking huge, and his body hurts in places he hadn’t realised it was possible to hurt in, but he’s found a little place for himself in Chicago. He makes his money babysitting for neighbours in his rented apartment block while they’re out bussing tables at local pizzerias, and he tells them he has stomach cancer when they look suspiciously at his bump. It gives him an excuse to look like the crap he does, too; dark circles have pretty much installed themselves under his eyes because angel-baby thinks that sleep is unnecessary, and he’s terminally pale.
Chicago in winter is bitch-ass cold, and he hates it, but there was something that just dragged him here when he was out on the interstate. Something he knew he needed. Something he hasn’t damn well found yet – thanks for the hunch, whoever - but that he’s still looking for.
He thought he found it when he found the church. Saint Michael the Archangel Catholic Church is so completely different from the one, lonely Catholic place in Windom that it kind of surprised him when he first saw it. It’s towering and Gothic; its spire looks more like it’s trying to stab Heaven in the belly than just point to it. He loves it. Loves the statue of Michael throwing down Lucifer that stands right in the middle of the altar – a giant ‘fuck you’ to the Devil.
He’s there when he’s found. There’s a flapping of wings and a guy in a trench coat is suddenly there. Only he’s not a guy, and Adam can see the wings arching out of his back that prove it. They’re huge. Four, massive expanses of gun-metal grey feathers, flecked on the underside with speckles of robins-egg blue. This guy is the first angel he’s seen since the Cage spat him out, and Adam’s kind of amazed that he can see him at all. The real him, not the meat in a trench coat that he’s wearing. The angel is a bright, frightening thing peering out from behind blue eyes, and Adam curls an arm around himself even though he knows it’ll do jack shit if the angel decides to attack - and he might, since angel-human hybrid babies are abominations, and all.
“I am Castiel,” the angel says, and that’s when Adam realises that he’s met the guy. Kind of. He’s seen the meat suit before, back when he couldn’t see angels for what they really were, and there’s a dim flash of recognition from the graveyard when Michael was in charge too. This is the guy who hit him with a burning bottle of holy oil.
That, unsurprisingly, doesn’t make him feel any better. Not in the slightest.
“What do you want with me?” he asks, and he hates that he sounds scared. He hates it. But he does, and he is.
He loves his baby. Hell, he still loves Michael, even if the great winged dick did get him pregnant and then not answer his prayers. He loves his baby because it’s his. It’s Michael’s. It’s a living, squirming thing inside of him. It thinks that three in the morning is the perfect time for kidney punching. It makes him spend money he can’t afford on this black-brown British goop called Marmite that tastes like the inside of an old beer barrel and yet somehow satisfies his cravings like nothing else. He doesn’t want angels near his baby, let alone standing over him while he’s in church, mid-way through a sucky and embarrassing prayer to its father.
The angel Castel just cocks his head to the side and stares at him. “Dean asked me to find you,” he says. “He claimed you were carrying a nephil. I did not believe him, but he was right.”
Angel-baby kicks and squirms. Adam feels the skin of his bump stretch and sink as it moves and tries not to think of how much of a walking horror movie he’s become. He’s learned the hard way that actually trying to watch his kid move beneath his skin just leads to a one-way trip to vomit-land.
He strokes the shifting skin and shudders.
“I did not think that Michael thought highly enough of humans to mate with one,” Castiel continues.
Adam grits his teeth in response. He’s not sure, out of the whole Apocalypse incident, if this angel ever even met Michael. It’s impossible to say. The best defence he has is, “I may be forgettable, but I do have actual, appealing qualities you know.”
And it sucks. More than his praying does – even if he has kind of been getting the hang of it over the last seven and a half months.
It makes him feel better that Castiel apparently doesn’t notice this epic suck, and instead nods like what Adam said makes perfect sense to him.
“Your brothers are worried for you,” he says.
“My brothers are worried about my kid turning out to be some kind of hideous monster,” Adam corrects. “Just in case they have to kill it, you know? I mean, it’s not like they cared that I was in Hell, so why start now? It’s just inconvenient.”
“They are good men.”
“That doesn’t mean shit,” Adam replies. “I was plenty good, and look what happened to me. Or did you think I chose this?”
The angel just studies him some more. There’s no holy oil in sight, though, and no blade slipping out of his sleeve, so he turns away and looks back at the statue instead. It – like the window back in Windom – looks nothing like the real Michael, but the grief in the angel’s expression as he stands over his fallen brother is more true to life than the artist probably realised.
“If you came to ask if he’s free too,” he says, “I don’t know. I haven’t seen or heard anything that would suggest it. I just woke up at home like nothing had happened.”
He looks round again, and Castiel is gone. Figuring that that was the answer he was looking for, Adam sits back in his pew and stares up at Michael and, damn it, blinks back tears that form in the corners of his eyes. He’s not going to cry. It’s hormones or something; not a vicious squeezing in his chest that leaves him breathless and doubled over his bump.
“Come home, already,” he whispers.
We desire to imitate your loyalty to God and Holy Mother
and your great love for God and people.
When he arrives back in his apartment, there are Winchesters. Winchesters and groceries, and Adam’s both amused, enraged, and entirely too tired to deal with this crap. He glares, heads for the food, and winces at the sight of bell pepper nestled proudly amongst associated vegetables.
“We figured you could use some vitamins,” Sam says, at the same time Dean says “You look like Hell.”
They glare at each other, and Adam sighs. There’s probably no getting rid of them – the angel undoubtedly has something to do with this, and it’s not like they were planning on letting him get away.
“Endearing, but I’m allergic to peppers,” he says. “Unless you really are planning on killing me and the kiddo – which, whatever, I wouldn’t be surprised – I’m going to say no thanks.” The next bag, however, reveals hamburgers, and he can almost forgive them. Almost.
“I don’t want your help,” he says. “Or need it. So why are you here?”
“You’re family,” Dean says, and it actually makes him shudder.
“Pull the other one,” he says.
Neither of them try and offer an explanation or an alternative, and they don’t stop him when he rips open the cellophane around the burgers and starts frying them off. He scrapes a thick layer of marmite over the bottom side of his bun; peanut butter on the top, and when it’s all said and done it’s the most gloriously disgusting thing he’s ever had. Baby-angel makes some kind of flipping movement that causes his bump to veer alarmingly to the left, and the expressions on his brothers’ faces make him snort. Again. He has a feeling he’ll be doing that often.
“He has at least six limbs, you know,” he says, patting his belly.
Sam, who stole back the pepper and proceeded to lace his burger with it – the heathen – looks faintly ill. “It really is Michael’s?”
“Nah, guys get pregnant all the time and I’m just fucking with you,” Adam replies, rolling his eyes and sharing a look with Dean who – while apparently appalled with the whole situation – at least seems to believe him.
He’s not going to explain any more than he already has. These two don’t get the memories. They don’t get the illusions of sunny days and grass under bare feet; of college lectures spent with Michael’s hand on his knee and his bed in his dorm room rumpled under the weight of a hundred red wings. They don’t get the touches and the kisses and the laughter of two desperate beings trying to make Heaven out of Hell.
Those memories are his. His and Michael’s. There’s something too sacred about them to share.
Still, he doesn’t kick Sam and Dean out. He figures they’ll go when they go. Either there’ll be a monster more interesting to hunt than one that’s still in the womb, or they’ll figure out that angel-baby isn’t a monster after all and just let them live. Adam knows it’s not like they’re staying for him.
They don’t buy peppers again, though, which is kind of nice of them.
Their presence is kind of irritating, though. He’s in pain. They’re making him paranoid as all Hell, and that’s on top of angel-baby squashing his internal organs in all the wrong directions. He’s tired and he hurts, and he avoids them as much as he can when they’re camped out in his living room. He’s hurtling towards what he assumes is his due date, he misses his Mom and desperately wants her with him even though he knows he can’t have her, and he’s got no idea how he’s supposed to get this baby out of him. C-Section, presumably, but he’s not too happy with the idea of gutting himself. Or getting anyone to gut him.
He goes into labour in late evening, about a week into his eighth month. At least, he presumes it’s labour. It’s like the cramping he’s had throughout his pregnancy, only a hundred times worse, and it rips through his abdomen with little regard for his safety or dignity as he doubles over screaming in the middle of an icy street. He’s on his way to church, driven out of his home by a God-awful restlessness and the omnipresence of his brothers and the smell of Dean’s chilli-fries. The pain lasts longer than a normal cramp would, but it does eventually end. He straightens, fixes his gaze on that knife-sharp spire, and forces himself to walk on.
“Michael,” he snarls through gritted teeth, “get here. Now.”
There’s no response before he makes it into the church. He pushes open the door and lets himself in, and he’s swallowed up by shadows and flickering candlelight. Another contraction sends him to his knees as his belly seems to fold in on itself. It dips in at the sides in a way that’s supposed to be physically impossible for the very good reason that it hurts like fuck. He swallows his scream, but he can’t stop himself from crying. Hot tears spill down his face – he feels like his waters should have broken, but there’s nowhere for them to go. They – along with angel-baby – are trapped inside of him.
He’s going to die here.
He fucking crawls to the altar. Rolls himself into a half-sitting position on the steps because lying on his back does nasty shit to his spine these days, and he tilts his head back to stare up at that beautiful, mournful face.
“Michael,” he says. “Michael.”
It lasts for hours. He drifts between contractions, through memories; through rage and despair as the reality of what’s happening really hits him. He remembers thinking that he was sick, back at the beginning of his pregnancy, with something that was probably fatal – he hates that he was kind of right.
He doesn’t want to die. Again. He wants to hold his angel-baby in his arms and be a parent. Hell, he wants to name the kid something other than angel-baby, but less corny than Angela. Or Angelo. Fuck no to both of those.
He can feel himself getting weaker. When black spots start appearing in front of his eyes, he figures he’s been internally bleeding for a while. He grimaces against another contraction, and slumps against the steps when it fades. The movement sends his thoughts scattering, and a phrase he learned when he was first out of the Cage and learning how to pray spirals though his brain.
It’s worth a shot, right?
“And since you are God’s messenger for the care of His people, we – I – entrust to you these special intentions,” he whispers.
“Take care of our baby, Mike.”
He wakes up to the feel of sunlight on his face, and he thinks he must be dead. Or worse – back in the Cage in another illusion. He’d have Michael, then, but the archangel probably won’t keep the hallucination going after Adam punches him for putting him through all that shit.
He opens his eyes slowly, and stares up at a vaulted ceiling decorated with elaborate Gothic carvings. The light on his face is from a stained glass window, and even though it’s got to be time for prayers, the place is deserted except for him.
And for Michael. Dark haired and dressed in denim and a white cotton T-Shirt, the archangel is looking up at the depiction of himself on the altar. His wings fill the church, flexing and rustling over each other and making a noise that sounds like a flock of birds. Adam’s hand goes to his stomach on autopilot, and he’s surprised to find it flat again. Hell, he’s surprised to be toned - it’s something he hasn’t been in a long, long time. Apparently, though, Michael was a big enough fan of his abs to heal him all the way after…after performing an emergency C-Section in a church? With…something?
Adam pushes himself up and clambers to his feet, and relishes how easy the movement is.
“Good timing,” he says.
Michael turns to look at him. There’s nothing human left in his vessel’s bright green eyes, but unlike with Castiel, Adam’s not afraid of that. Mostly because he’s used to it; partly because of the tiny bundle cradled in Michael’s arms. Angel-baby.
“I heard your prayers,” Michael says. Adam wants to swear at him for that just on principal, but Michael continues before he can. “I would have come earlier, but I was occupied.”
“Do I get to know with what?” Adam asks, because from the mutterings of his brothers he’s fairly sure that it hasn’t been Heaven.
“Creating vessels,” Michael says. “For myself and for –“ He looks down at their baby, and Adam peers down along with him.
There’s a gratifying lack of extraneous limbs. Actually, angel-baby looks kind of adorable. He’s smooth-skinned and glowing with a kind of angelic radiance; not red and wrinkled, but that’s probably because the vessel didn’t have to suffer through anything as traumatic as childbirth. He’s got tiny hands and tiny toes, and a dusting of fair hair on the top of his head. He’s a thousand times more perfect than Adam had expected, and he reaches out a finger to touch his son’s pudgy cheek.
He’s falling in love all over again.
“We made a thing,” he says. He’s a little bit proud of that.
“He is a nephil,” Michael tells him, because he’s an angel and ‘literal’ doesn’t quite describe it.
“I know,” Adam says. He can’t resist any more and he scoops angel-baby straight out of Michael’s arms; cradles him to his chest and supports his head like all the parents on TV tell you to, and when he does he feels little bumps on his back under the skin. “What’s on his back?”
“Wing buds,” Michael tells him. “He will have many, and be strong.”
“I thought nephilim were a bad thing,” Adam says, even though he can’t imagine his baby being bad for anything. Funny, that, since he nearly died last night.
“Father has given us a second chance,” Michael says. “This child is a part of that, though I do not know the Wording of His Plan.”
Adam feels the capital letters like weights on his soul, and he looks up into Michael’s eyes. The archangel is frowning. He doesn’t like not being in the know, but Adam thinks he can see the sense in it. If he dares to apply human logic to the Will of God – and let’s face it, he wouldn’t be the first – then having seen what happened when Michael did know the plan, then having him not know might be good insurance for the rest of the planet.
And who knows? Maybe parenting will give angel-boy a crash course in free will and all that jazz. It’s definitely going to be an education for Adam.
“We should name him,” he says, because he’s not about to debate theology with an archangel. Not yet, anyway.
“Angel chicks are Created knowing their names,” Michael says, and Adam sighs. Education.
“He’s a nephil. Humans name their children. And since he’s not in a form that can tell us, we should give him a name that’s not angel-baby so that we can actually call him something. If he wants to tell us his angel name later or whatever, then that’s cool. But angel-baby needs to go.”
Michael nods. And thinks. And a crazy idea crosses through Adam’s mind that’s both so good and so insane that he thinks he might not have entirely recovered from the birth after all. He bites his tongue a moment longer, just to see if Michael thinks of something, but the archangel is silent except for the susurrus shifting of his wings.
“How about Luke?” Adam says before the silence can stretch out too awkwardly. Michael stares at him. “After your brother.”
After the fallen archangel still, hopefully, raging in the depths of the Cage; after the brother Michael loves above all his legion others. After Lucifer, who – in a crazy, sideways way of looking at things – brought them together.
“Luke,” Michael says. He looks down at the nephil in Adam’s arms, and Adam thinks he can see a bit of pride in those eyes.
“Yeah,” Adam says. “Luke Milligan. Sounds alright, doesn’t it?”
“It is…suitable,” Michael agrees after another moment of staring. “Yes.”
His hand brushes Luke’s forehead in the tenderest of gestures. There’s a tiny flare of white light under his fingertips, and Adam has a sneaking suspicion that some kind of blessing has just gone down. He smiles, unable to stop himself, and leans forward to touch a kiss to Michael’s cheek.
It’s different, doing this in a body instead of just having his soul open to the archangel’s power, but he can still feel the grace running beneath Michael’s skin. He can smell leather and motor oil and a little touch of Old Spice.
He can smell home.
Michael’s arm slides around his waist. He might still be an angel, and an awkward one at that, but Adam had coached him gently into the art of physical affection. It helps that he can see and hear Michael’s wings folding around them to form a cocoon of red feathers.
“Take us home?” he suggests, pressing his face into the crook of Michael’s neck.
Huge wings beat with a sound like thunder, and the Church of Saint Michael vanishes from under their feet.
Author: Evandar
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Angst/Romance
Pairings: Michael/Adam
Warning: M-Preg
Disclaimer: I do not own Supernatural and am making no profit from this story.
Summary: Adam wakes up one morning in Windom instead of the Cage. Life is good and his Mom is alive - it’s like nothing ever happened. Except, his stomach keeps cramping and he feels sick in the mornings, and Michael isn’t answering his (rather terrible) prayers. He’s alone, lost, and he thinks he might be pregnant. Clearly, a road trip is in order.
Author's Notes: This was written for
spnmpregbb and is just long enough to hit the 10k track. Thank you so much to 2people2 for the wonderful beta work, and to minions4pie for signing up to be my artist and creating some absolutely beautiful pieces inspired by this fic - they can be found here at her journal, so go take a look! Thanks also to R for her patience in acting as a sounding board and for fangirling over SPN with me, and to yohkobennington for running a great bang.I've never been to any of the places mentioned in this fic, so please excuse any inaccuracies - I did what I could with Google Images.
When he wakes up every morning, he expects the world to change. He expects the familiar walls of his bedroom to change to some kind of nightmare world. He expects to see his Mom ripped apart by those monsters again; for blood to drip down the walls and the Devil in his half-brother’s body to set the world on fire. He expects Michael, whether in the form of white-red light as he prays and rages and despairs, or in the form of a dark-haired man.
Michael never comes. Sometimes, Adam tries praying, but for all that he was possessed by an archangel, he’s never been religious and it comes out as half of an awkward conversation. He stops, embarrassed, before he can say anything that might have an actual meaning. There are so many things that he could say; should say. Michael, for all he was kind of a dick – and Adam suspects that that’s kind of a species trait – did help him, down in the Cage. He sheltered him from the worst of it. Wrapped him in light and wings the colour of blood, and took the brunt of Hell’s worst punishment on himself.
So Adam prays, uncomfortably, and Michael never comes and the world never melts away into terror. It’s real. He’s really somehow – miraculously – alive again. He doesn’t understand it, but he’s not ungrateful.
He’s got his Mom back. He’s got a full-ride at college when he starts again in the fall, and the memories of the last year – the year he was dead or possessed – seem to have been wiped from everyone around him. Hell, his professors think he’s taken the year off for ‘personal reasons’. It’s a clean slate. One he’s trying to make the most of.
He supposes that, since he was presumably returned to life by God – and damn doesn’t that sound arrogant – that he should start going to church and bake sales and fundraisers and start practising religion. Only, from what he remembers of having Michael inside him, the whole religion thing is more personal than scraping money together for a new church roof. And, as mentioned, he’s not great at praying. Like, on his knees with his hands clasped and actually saying “thanks dude” and being mortified by his own stupidity kind of not great. ‘Not great’ is probably an understatement, actually.
So he doesn’t go to church. No change there. He does volunteer at an animal shelter, but that’s more because the kittens are adorable balls of crazy and because animals are easier to talk to than people… or angels.
He wakes up every morning to blue walls and childhood posters and the sinking feeling that the other shoe is going to drop sometime soon. Then he hears his Mom humming if she’s up and in the kitchen, or finds a note taped to the fridge door with her shift pattern on it, and he realises that it’s not going to. So he’ll either join his Mom for breakfast or make something for himself, and he’ll get on with his life because he damn well has one.
He looks up angelic lore. He learns how to shoot a gun and starts jogging round the neighbourhood. He reads books on demons and werewolves and finds a weird series about his half-brothers that’s got scary-ass fangirls and a small following of people who call it the Winchester Gospel, like it’s part of the Bible or something. He supposes that it might be; their lives certainly seemed to revolve around angels and demons and the Devil enough for it to be true. He reads the books, reads some of the fanfics for shits and giggles and then wishes he hadn’t, and he resolves never to get involved with Sam and Dean like ever again. He’s going to use this second chance to take advantage of his full-ride, graduate school and become a doctor, and he’s going to help people. Granted, it’s what he was planning on doing anyway, which may be kind of a cop-out, but hey; it’s what he wants to do. And if he uses his knowledge of hunters to sometimes help them on the sly someday? Well… that’ll be his business.
He’s so fucking determined to put everything behind him that he doesn’t notice when the memories of the Cage start to fade from an ever-present fear of unimaginable horrors, to something calmer. Something his human brain can process without wanting to implode. His memories of Michael’s true form become less mind-burningly bright. Sam’s echoing screams fade to whispers and Lucifer’s fury is reduced to embers. He remembers Michael with black hair and a handsome face and an illusion of red wings arching from the back of a leather jacket.
When he realises that he’s forgetting the enormity of Michael’s true form and the way his grace felt as it buzzed around the edges of his soul, he’s so freaked out that he tries praying again. It’s a brief experiment that leaves him feeling like he should just go bury himself in the backyard or something. He doesn’t pray again until he gets sick.
It starts off small. He’s tired all the damn time. His Mom presses the back of her hand to his forehead and frowns when she doesn’t find a temperature and he’s still in bed at 2pm; she mutters something uncomplimentary about teenagers under her breath and threatens him with a glass of cold water dumped on his head unless he gets himself up. He doesn’t risk her wrath further, and he has to start dragging himself out from under the covers every day to stop her from getting mad.
He saw her get eaten, damn it. He doesn’t want her mad at him.
It doesn’t stop there. He gets stomach cramps. Bad ones that grip his lower belly at the worst moments and make him think he’s going to shit himself in public. But it’s when his nipples start to darken and grow so sensitive that a T-Shirt becomes uncomfortable, he stops thinking ‘indigestion’ and starts thinking ‘what the fuck?’ instead.
Two months after he woke up to find himself alive and whole in his bedroom, he goes to church.
It’s his local Catholic place. It’s all pale bricks and a red roof with stained glass windows, and it has a sign outside that says that Jesus loves him. He picks it because it’s close – it’s within walking distance of his house, and he hasn’t felt like driving lately; he gets claustrophobic every time the door slams shut. It’s nice and cool inside, and gratifyingly empty. No one around to see him make an idiot of himself except the angels in the windows and the plaster Jesus they have hanging over the altar.
He spots an image of Michael; an image of what’s supposed to be Michael. He’s more drawn to it than he wants to be, and sits in the pool of red light cast by the sun glaring through his stained glass robes. Window-Michael is blond and white-winged and nothing at all like the real deal, but there’s a serenity to his face that makes Adam feel like somehow, something’s going to make sense someday.
Still, he wonders what the priest would say if he told him the artist had it wrong: that it was Lucifer’s wings that were white and that they shone brighter than the sun even as he plummeted down into the Cage. It doesn’t bear thinking about. Besides, he’s procrastinating.
He shifts on his pew, folds his hands in his lap, and bows his head.
He feels like there’s supposed to be some sort of reaction. Like he’s supposed to feel warm and peaceful like the weight of God’s attention is on him. He feels stupid.
“Hi,” he says, grateful once more that the church is empty. He looks at his hands with the ragged skin around his nails; past them to his feet, and he flexes his toes around the spokes of his flip-flop straps. He sighs. Tries again. “Hey Michael.”
He looks up at the window and the kind, peaceful face – bland, he thinks – and thinks back to the Cage, tries to capture the image of Michael’s true self in his mind’s eye and fails. He settles for the black-haired vessel, whoever that was; he never had been told who else the archangel had worn.
“So I’m fine, I guess. I mean, I’m trying to keep busy and my textbooks say I probably have pancreatitis so I should kind of see a doctor. Uh.” He clears his throat. “Did you get out? When I did, I mean. Was that God? ‘Cause no offense or anything, but to take me out of there just to leave you behind would be shitty. And taking me out of there to kill me off with a crappy disease is shittier. Uh.”
He’s probably not supposed to swear in church, least of all when aiming it at God. Well, it’s too late for that now.
“I hope you’re free somewhere and not planning to destroy the world or anything,” he says. “You were good, you know? To me, I mean. You didn’t have to be. I’m like, an ant or something by comparison, so you didn’t have to be that good to me but you were and I – I want to thank you for that. I should have thanked you months ago, but I’m bad at this. Really bad. You can, uh, probably tell. I – “
He takes a deep breath. Long and slow, and tries to pretend that his eyes aren’t beginning to water.
“I miss you,” he says.
He signs off with an “amen” because that’s what he’s been told you do when you pray, even though it makes him feel more ridiculous than the opening salvo of “hi”. He stands carefully, hand flying to his stomach when as a sudden cramp almost brings him to his knees. “Damn it,” he mutters.
When the pain fades, he looks up at the window again. “Give me a sign, okay?” he says, because “amen” is for losers. “Let me know, somehow, if you’re out. It’d be good to see you again, you know.”
Again, he feels nothing except the residual pain left in his belly and a vague sense of – presumably – internal disapproval. The sense that he has no idea what he’s doing, but that he’s definitely doing it wrong.
He mutters to himself on the way out of the door. “Life would be easier if angels had cell phones,” and steps back out into the summer heat.
It’s April, so it’s not really summer, but it’s swelteringly hot – unusually so for Minnesota, and the walk home has him sweating. His Mom’s back when he arrives, on the stairs with a basket of laundry on her hip. She gives him the oddest look when he walks in.
“Adam? Are you okay, honey?”
Words stick on his tongue. He shrugs. “Yeah, why?”
“You’re holding your stomach,” she tells him, and he moves his hand away from his abdomen. He hadn’t even realised he was doing it. She walks down the stairs a bit quicker, and she presses her hand to his forehead again. “Are you sick?”
According to his medical textbooks, he is. Very sick. As in, should go to hospital sick. But he doesn’t feel it. Yeah, the cramps are damn uncomfortable, but he’s not shitting or vomiting blood so he figures it’s not all that bad; the tiredness is a pain in the ass, but again, probably not fatal. It’s weird. He’s sick, kind of, and he knows that he has to be, but for some reason he just doesn’t feel it.
“Nah, I’m fine,” he tells her, leaning in to press a kiss to her cheek. “I’m just hungry.” He’s nothing of the sort, but it is believable. And he should probably eat or something at some point, but all he really wants to do is curl up in bed with a terrible book or a window open on MoreThanBrothers.net so that he can laugh at his half-brothers’ man-pain while pretending that they’re fictional characters who didn’t abandon him in Hell.
He shakes his head as he walks through to the kitchen. There’s a part of him that thinks he’s losing his damn mind. There’s a part of him that wants to forget that he died, forget Heaven and Hell and Michael, and relegate all of that to ‘crazy-ass dream’ territory, but he can’t. Mostly because while his death was horrible, and Hell was a million times worse, forgetting Michael is the last thing that he wants to do.
He curls up with his laptop later, a peanut butter and sausage sandwich on a plate by his elbow, and a tab open on Samlicker81’s latest traumatic offering to the world of online pornography. But in another tab, he’s looking up prayers to Michael – the proper, official-type churchy ones, so that next time he can do it better.
He chews thoughtfully on his sandwich. There shouldn’t be a next time, not really, but somehow he already knows that there will be.
loyal champion of God and His People.
I turn to you with confidence
and seek your powerful intercession.
His new obsession with peanut butter on everything is beginning to get worrying. There’s a slight thickening of his waist that none of his half-hearted jogging can seem to work off and his nipples are so damn sore that they’re starting to swell and puff up; the smell of bacon in the mornings makes him feel sick – sometimes even be sick, which is getting kind of hard to keep from his Mom – but peanut butter goes with everything now. Especially sausage. And olives. He doesn’t even like olives.
He’s taken to walking or jogging everywhere despite the soaring temperatures because the car still makes him feel nervous and because it’s healthy. It’s not healthy that he has to wear a thicker T-Shirt than normal to hide his swollen nipples, and he ends up drinking Gatorade by the gallon. He tells himself that’s why he needs to pee all the time and that it’s not because of his weird-ass medical condition that’s definitely not pancreatitis.
He stops by the church on his way home from the animal shelter every day so he can talk to Michael. It’s really more like ranting at Michael: he’s learned the proper prayers and stuff, but he rarely ever uses them; all the fancy titles seem a little over the top when you’re talking to the guy who wore you like a tux. The vicar’s starting to recognise him. He’s seen him a few times, and he keeps trying to get Adam to come to an actual service instead of sitting and muttering at a window – Adam’s version of praying still leaves a lot to be desired, he just has less shame about the whole thing.
“So yeah,” he tells Michael, “peanut butter is definitely not diet food, and I’m getting a bit chunky. Ever hear of a chunky Winchester? I mean, I know I was pretty much your last resort and all, but damn am I not fine in comparison.”
There’s a calm silence in response, accompanied by a sense of amusement. If Adam hadn’t known for a fact that Michael had no sense of humour, he would have accused the archangel of laughing at him. But they got to know each other in the Cage, and he knows that Michael wouldn’t, if only because he doesn’t laugh at anything. It’s probably internalised. He still thinks he’s kind of dumb for doing this.
And besides, if the wild theory that he’s beginning to consider is right, then it’s really not funny at all, no matter how badly he words it.
“I’m going to the bookstore later,” he says. “The next part of the Winchester Gospel –“ he punctuates that, as always, with a snort “-is being released, so. Yeah. Even though I kind of have spoilers for the ending, I’m going to buy it. Someone’s gotta help fund the author’s alcohol habit, right?”
He stands, runs his hand through his hair and then drops it to rest on his belly. “Hope you’re okay,” he says. “Let me know sometime, okay? You know, whenever you decide to get off your cloud and answer. It’s not like I don’t know you’re real. See ya, Michael.”
There’s a nerdy-type bookstore in the middle of town, and that’s where he heads when he’s finished. He wasn’t joking about Supernatural; the next book, Lazarus Rising is being released today and he has every intention of getting it. If only because - spoilers - the relationship between Dean and Castiel is something the fangirls are going to go wild for.
He wonders what kind of person that makes him, that he reads amateur porn about his half-brothers. Weird, definitely. Fourth-wall breakingly weird.
The Adam before he died would never have set foot in this place. It’s unnecessarily dark and cluttered, and populated by guys who speak in monotone voices. But it’s the only local store that carries Carver Edlund’s terrible writing and Amazon’s made of evil, so it’s there that he goes, ducking his head in case anyone he went to school with spots him. It’s a vain and futile effort; the guy behind the counter was in his AP Maths class. He’s called Jerry, and he’s actually kind of cool apart from the fact that he knows Adam’s dirty secret.
“Hey Adam,” he says. “You here for your order?”
Adam nods and grimaces slightly; wincing when he’s handed a mass market paperback with a half-naked artist’s impression of Dean on the cover. He’s pouting, thumbs tucked into the waist of his jeans. There are the shadows of wings spread out behind him. It’s the most gloriously tacky thing that Adam’s ever held.
“You’re really into this stuff, huh?” Jerry asks. “You know they got a convention?”
“I’ve heard,” Adam says, pulling out his wallet and shoving some crumpled bills over, trying to look as reluctant as possible. “Apparently there were ghosts at the first one.”
Jerry snickers. “Great advertising, right?” He doesn’t believe in ghosts and shit because, unlike Adam, his life is gloriously sane and normal.
Adam makes a noise that may have been a laugh at some point, and watches as Dean’s rippling abs are wrapped in brown paper and sealed with a sticker. He’s feeling weird again. Light-headed and fuzzy, so he leans against the counter and listens to Jerry babble until he feels something wet on his top lip and the narrative of how Carver Edlund really sucks at public speaking falters.
“Dude, you’re bleeding,” Jerry says.
He raises a hand to his face, brushes his fingers under his nose and comes away with a smear of blood on his fingers the same colour as Michael’s wings. His heart pounds in his chest. “Shit,” he breathes.
He’s panicking. For some reason he doesn’t understand, it’s definitely panic that’s making his hands tremble as he accepts a tissue from Jerry. Why is he panicking? It’s a damn nosebleed. He’s not bothered by blood, he’s had them before plenty of times; why is this one different?
His theory. The one he’s been mentally poking with a stick for the last month, rises like some kind of mythical beast from the murky depths of his subconscious. He swallows reflexively and tastes metal on his tongue. No. No no no no no. He is not going to pass out. He’s not p-
The world swims and he closes his eyes. Jerry’s chirping of “Adam? Adam, are you okay?” fades into white noise as memories of the Cage swim through his head. Memories of red wings and feathers the size of his own body; of a voice so deep it made his bones shake; peace found in an impenetrable embrace. He remembers Michael taking a human form and exploring his memories with resolution and confusion – entering them to dispel the illusions created by the Cage, but staying to explore what his Father’s greatest creations had made of the world; he remembers Michael in his classes, in his dorm room, in his bed. The press of the archangel entering him and the curious light in his green eyes. He remembers watching Riverfest fireworks with wings wrapped around him and introducing Michael to barbecue ribs on the Fourth of July.
He remembers falling in love and having it snatched away again.
“Adam?”
“I’m fine,” he says. “Sorry. Just dizzy.”
Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. He needs to get out. He needs to go and find an archangel and pluck him like a freaking turkey because God damn it, he’s standing in a comic book store and he’s just realised he’s pregnant.
He needs so much help, it’s unreal. But how the fuck does a pregnant guy get help without being dissected?
He blows Jerry off with a “see you later” and heads out of the door, back the route he came, and up the steps into the church. “You son of a bitch,” he tells the window. “You absolute son of a bitch.” There’s people around for once and he’s definitely not mumbling this time, and he’s peripherally aware of the shocked looks he gets from pearl-clutchers on his way back out, but he’s so past caring that it’s not even funny. Most of them probably follow the Hallmark-angel train of thought anyway, which shows what they know.
He makes it home in record time, sweating through his T-Shirt and panting. His Mom’s thankfully not around to see him tear around the house like a lunatic, packing a duffel bag and swearing like a sailor. The first vestiges of a plan are forming in his head, triggered when he throws Lazarus Rising onto his bed.
He’s not going to get involved with Sam and Dean again. They can go fuck themselves – or each other, whatever – but they’re not the only hunters out there, and Supernatural did provide an almost complete address for the one guy in the whole Anti-Apocalypse brigade with a functioning brain.
He’s going to South Dakota.
It’s the feel of sweat dripping down his spine and a cramping in his belly that slows him down. He looks at the bombsite that he’s made of his room and grimaces, strips off his shirt and heads for the shower. He needs to be clean. He needs to think.
He catches sight of his reflection in the bathroom mirror. He’s pale and mad-looking with wide eyes and his hair sticking up all over the place, and his puffy nipples make him cringe. He touches them, winces, and slides his hands downwards to cover his belly. His baby. Aside from the slight thickening, there’s no visible difference. There’s no way that what he’s thinking is even possible, but he’s seen a lot of things lately that aren’t supposed to be possible, so what’s one more?
“Michael,” he whispers, “if you’re not listening, you might want to start.” He takes a deep breath. “I really need your help.”
He tells himself that this is as close as he’ll ever come to begging, but he knows it’s a lie. He’s going to beg. He’s going to scream. He’s possibly even going to die – the male body isn’t supposed to be able to do what his apparently is, and it sure as Hell explains all the cramping. His internal organs are already getting squashed as they’re being pushed aside by his – womb? He has a womb now?
He can’t take looking at his reflection any more. He steps in the shower and lets the water wash away his sweat and his frustration. Stepping out, he wishes he’d held on to the latter, at least; all that’s left is a cold ball of fear that settles low in his chest. He’s never going to be able to explain this. Not to his Mom; not to anyone.
He needs to go.
He leaves his Mom a note, telling her that he’s gone on a road trip and he doesn’t know when he’ll be back. That he needs some space for a while. It’s going to send her into a panic, but he doesn’t know what else to tell her. Certainly not the truth. Then he throws his bag in the passenger side of his car and slides behind the wheel for the first time in months.
The seatbelt is an unwelcome pressure against his abdomen, and the walls and roof seem to press down on him, but he’s definitely not walking to South Dakota. So he rolls the windows all the way down and backs up off the drive, throws his baby – hah – in gear, and puts his foot down.
It’s been four months since he was let out of the Cage. He figures from his symptoms that he’s been pregnant for around the same amount of time. He doubts he’s going to make it to term, so he’s halfway through already.
Sioux Falls suddenly seems too far away.
Who made you so glorious in grace and power,
and for the love of the Mother of Jesus, the Queen of the Angels,
be pleased to hear our prayer.
By the time he gets there, a little over an hour and a half later, Sioux Falls seems entirely too close, and it’s dawned on him that he has no idea if this Bobby Singer guy survived the showdown in Stull, or even if he can help him in the first place. That, and he has no idea where the guy’s salvage yard actually is. He’s been there before, he knows that, but in his defence, he’d just been resurrected at the time and that would screw anyone’s mind up.
He stops in town for a bathroom break. Makes his way to the local diner and gets something depressingly un-caffeinated to drink – he figures that angel-baby hasn’t had too much harm done so far, but doesn’t want to make it worse – and to ask for directions. Fortunately, Bobby Singer has a bit of a reputation for being the town whacko when he’s not being handy with a wrench, so the waitress has no problem writing those directions onto a napkin for him. No problem in flipping the napkin over and writing her number on the other side, either, and once upon a time, Adam might have taken her up on that.
Instead, he tips her and heads back to his car without letting his eyes stray too far beyond her name tag - Amber B - and sips his Sprite all the way out along the road to Singer Salvage Yard.
He doesn’t remember much of the place. He only stayed briefly, and he’d fled the place at night, so he hadn’t realised just how large Bobby Singer’s place was. Surrounded by stacks of rusted cars and old tyres, the house is pretty much hidden from the road; its boarded walls decorated with old hubcaps.
Adam pulls up in the front yard and parks, gets out before he can change his mind and stretches. Regardless of what’s going to happen next, he’s glad to be out of the damn car. He peers up at the dark windows and offers a quick prayer up to Michael that someone’s in, and while he’s pretty sure by this point that Michael’s not listening, it does make him feel a little bit better. He might be getting the hang of it, he thinks, as he makes his way up the porch steps.
He catches sight of salt by the windows. There’s an iron horseshoe over the door and a devil’s trap carved into the porch roof. Bobby Singer is paranoid as all Hell. Clearly.
He raises his hand and knocks before he can hesitate any more than he already has. The wait afterwards, though, is nothing less than excruciating: his brain coming up with every single reason he’s already thought of for why this is a stupid idea and reminding him of them. But then the door opens, revealing the barrel of a shotgun and a rugged face he vaguely remembers from an age ago.
“Uh, hi,” he says, and is momentarily appalled that he’s just as awkward around real people as he is in churches.
He sees Singer’s eyes flick up to the devil’s trap. There’s a pause, and then there’s a thud on the other side of the door and agony spiralling through his stomach. He gasps and folds in half; his hands grasp at his stomach as he tries desperately to protect the life within him. “Stop it,” he says, but it comes out as more of a sob as something in his belly twists. “Stop.” He doesn’t care that he’s begging; it’s the most pain he’s been in since the Cage and he wants it to be over.
The pain eases, but there’re black spots dancing in front of his eyes. He’s struggling to breathe when the door opens wider and Singer hauls him into the house by his bicep.
When he comes to, he’s on a couch. A familiar couch, since he’s been in this position on it before, but one that’s surrounded by more Enochian sigils than he thought possible. Apparently, he’s been unconscious long enough for Singer to do some redecorating.
The room he’s in is filled with books and dust, and Singer’s with him, watching him with the shotgun across his lap. “Whatever you did, please don’t do it again,” he says, struggling to sit up. A wave of dizziness hits, and he ends up slumping back onto the couch twice before he manages to haul himself upright.
“Angel banishing sigil,” Singer says. “Last time I saw you, boy, you were possessed by Michael.”
His baby’s hurt by banishing sigils? Good to know for the future. He draws his knees up to his chest and hugs them. “I’m not anymore,” he says. “We separated when we were dragged into the Cage. He protected me in there, but…I got out four months ago. I don’t know where Michael is; if he’s down there, or somewhere else.”
Singer nods, but Adam’s pretty sure that he doesn’t believe him. He wouldn’t, and Singer’s paranoid enough for the both of them.
“Got a drink?” he asks, mostly to break the silence.
He’s pretty sure that what he’s handed is holy water. He sips it anyway. It’s warm and faintly metallic, but it’s good. It soothes his throat, and gives him something to do that isn’t stare at the check pattern on Singer’s shirt or the books on his shelves. Even though some of them look pretty fascinating, and he’d love to take a closer look, it’s not why he’s here.
He waits for Singer to ask, though. He’s not just going to launch into his explanations – he’s going to sound enough like a lunatic as it is.
“That sigil wouldn’t have hurt you if you were human,” Singer says when the silence grows awkward again. “So what the Hell are you?”
“Human,” he replies. “I’m human, I promise. It’s just… Michael left something behind, I think. We, er, got close in the Cage, you know? And –“
And he’s definitely sounding like a lunatic. It’s about to get worse. He takes a sip of water in an attempt to steel his nerves, curses Michael six ways in his head, and takes a deep breath. “We got close in the Cage,” he says again. “And now I’m pregnant. And I have no idea what to do, so I came here for help, because I figured you’re already used to this supernatural bullshit anyway.”
He waits for the full effect of his words to sink in. Singer’s horrified expression is a thing of beauty.
“So, yeah. Sorry to just crash in like this, but I’m kind of desperate.”
There’s honestly not much more that he can say than that. He could babble, and God, the words are just building up on his tongue ready to spill out. He could go on for hours about Michael and the Cage and how frustrated and angry and scared he is, but there’s no way in Hell that he’s going to unleash that much straight off – not to a guy who works with his brothers and didn’t intervene when they abandoned him down there.
Besides, it looks like Singer’s in shock. He clears his throat, swallows his outrage, and asks, “Are you okay, man?”
Singer looks at him like he’s lost his mind. Adam supposes it’s not an unreasonable reaction. But instead of calling him out on it, Singer just huffs something about needing a damn drink and puts the shotgun down. “You coming, idjit?” he asks as he stands.
“Sure,” Adam replies. “Got anything non-alcoholic?”
May no stain of evil ever disfigure its beauty.
Once Singer has him set up in a spare room with clean sheets on a previously dusty bed, Adam installs himself in the guy’s impressive library and researches angels. It’s both ridiculously easy – Singer has more books on the subject than Adam had realised existed – and hard, much for the same reason. He ploughs his way through the Bible, the Qur’an, and the Torah. He reads rarer gospels too, like the Book of Enoch, and studies Sumerian and Egyptian accounts with dictionaries balanced, open, on his swelling stomach.
He finds the story of the nephilim fairly early on, and he keeps coming back to it – to the story of the watcher angels and their giant children, destroyed mercilessly in Noah’s flood. He’s not entirely sure what the difference between an archangel and a watcher angel is beyond power level, but he learns that some of them were kicked out for having their weirdo angel-human children against God’s will. Or something. It’s probably not entirely accurate, but it’s not comforting either. Not when he has one of those angel-human hybrids growing inside of him and shoving his internal organs out of its way.
If one of the reasons the flood was sent was to destroy the nephilim, then his kid? Probably fucked. Like, from before birth. He’s half a Winchester, and his luck’s been pretty crappy so far.
He spends his time drifting between his room, the library, and the kitchen. Singer leaves him to himself, for the most part; Adam pays his rent on time and helps out with research every so often in exchange for Singer’s hospitality. He doesn’t cook, except for himself. His taste buds have gone completely nuts, and his pregnancy cravings have hit with a vengeance.
He’s halfway through a tuna and peanut butter sandwich and his fifteenth reread of the Book of Enoch when there’s a rumble of a car engine from outside, and he peers out of the window in time to see a sleek Chevy Impala pull up next to his own, abandoned, vehicle. It’s too familiar – it’s the car he learned to drive in; it’s the car his brothers grew up in. The doors creak and slam as they climb out, bundled up in denim, leather, and flannel, and Adam feels something like rage burn inside of him. They look exactly as they always did. They escaped, unscathed, and left him behind to burn. He’s under no illusions at all that his time in the Cage could have been infinitely different had Michael not developed some kind of empathy for him; had they not come to know each other so intimately over the millennia of Hell-time that they’d been down there together.
He’s lost his appetite. He hears the door slam downstairs and levers himself from his chair with a sigh, abandoning his sandwich in favour of biting the bullet and going downstairs. He’s not dumb enough to think that Singer won’t have told them.
His belly cramps as he stands, and there’s a soft fluttering that he’s starting to think is his baby moving. It’s been happening more and more often, and while he can’t feel it when he presses his hand over his stretched skin, he can definitely feel it inside of him. His little angel-baby is live and presumably kicking. Or flapping. Or both.
He climbs down the stairs as carefully and quietly as he can and pushes open the door to Singer’s living room. His half-brothers… They kind of fill what little space is left between the furniture and the stacks of books and papers. Singer looks at him when he walks in, and his brothers turn, and the room goes so quiet that Adam knows he was right about being the topic of conversation.
Worse, his T-Shirts don’t hide the worst of the baby bump any more. He’s not sure exactly what they’re thinking as they stand there staring at him, but there’s definitely anger in the set of Dean’s jaw and a kind of hollow grief in Sam’s eyes. Taking a wild guess, he – and his baby – are just one more supernatural fuck-up in a long, long history of supernatural fuck-ups, and they aren’t sure whether to mourn him or shoot him.
He glances towards Singer again, and knows he’ll have no help from that quarter. The guy’s a good man but his loyalty is to the Winchesters, not John’s bastard. It was good while it lasted, but Adam knows he’s outstayed his welcome.
He just wishes he knew what the fuck he’s supposed to do next.
“This isn’t possible,” Dean mutters. He’s pacing the living room, wooden floors creaking under his boots, and watching him is making Adam dizzy. He doesn’t want to take his eyes off him, though. He can’t see Dean as anything other than a threat. Sam, either, though his other brother isn’t pacing – he’s just staring between Dean and Adam with a lost expression on his face.
“I mean, you’re a dude. Dudes don’t get knocked up,” Dean continues.
“Tell that to Michael,” Adam grumbles, because it’s something still he doesn’t understand either.
“Yeah,” Dean says. “Him. He out of the box too?”
Adam shrugs. “No idea.” He tucks his feet up onto the chair so that he can wrap his arms around his knees. Angel-baby shifts again inside of him, and he likes to think that it’s because it’s heard its father’s name. He hasn’t noticed a pattern, or anything, and he holds no illusions about Michael ever actually turning up and being a parent because that’s something that just doesn’t happen to Milligans. Like, ever. But still. He likes to think it.
“It’s not like I even know how I got out,” he says. “My best guess is God, but, yeah. Not exactly sure why He’d step in to bail me.”
Dean snorts, and that’s apparently that.
Sam cuts in. “I don’t remember you and Michael being close enough for, uh, this. When you were down there.”
Adam shrugs again. “He stopped possessing me pretty much immediately, but he never left,” he says, picking at a loose thread on the knee of his jeans. “I heard you screaming, and I saw Lucifer a couple of times, but Michael was just there, you know? I think he felt guilty or something.”
“But he-“
“The Cage makes you hallucinate,” Adam tells him. “Quoth the archangel.”
Sam opens his mouth as if to argue, but Adam’s not interested. He shifts. He likes this position, really, but damn if the baby bump doesn’t get in the way. And besides, awkward reunions suck for everyone.
“Look,” he says as he clambers to his feet. “There’s nothing more than that to tell you, and the kid’s mine. Nothing to do with you – Hell, we’re barely even family. So, yeah. Just pretend like I’m not here and I’ll make it happen.”
He looks at Singer and smiles; he really is a decent guy. “Thanks,” he says. “For everything.”
“Wait a minute, you’re leaving?” Dean asks.
“Pretty much,” he replies. He meets Dean’s eyes and he doesn’t like what he sees there. The panic and the fear all feel too much like an attempt to take control, and he smiles to try and take the sting out of what he has to say – or to make it worse. He’s not too sure of that. “I don’t trust you around my kid.”
Dean flinches, but when Adam goes to leave, he doesn’t stop him. No one stops him; not while he’s packing or while he’s lugging his duffel bag down to his car. He glances back long enough to see three pale faces in the window, and he knows that he’s going to pay for this somehow. That somewhere down the line, something’s going to come along and bite him on the ass, all because he told Dean Winchester ‘no’. Probably.
He pulls out of Singer Salvage Yard, picks a direction, and drives.
He’s been in Illinois for six weeks when he’s discovered. He’s freaking huge, and his body hurts in places he hadn’t realised it was possible to hurt in, but he’s found a little place for himself in Chicago. He makes his money babysitting for neighbours in his rented apartment block while they’re out bussing tables at local pizzerias, and he tells them he has stomach cancer when they look suspiciously at his bump. It gives him an excuse to look like the crap he does, too; dark circles have pretty much installed themselves under his eyes because angel-baby thinks that sleep is unnecessary, and he’s terminally pale.
Chicago in winter is bitch-ass cold, and he hates it, but there was something that just dragged him here when he was out on the interstate. Something he knew he needed. Something he hasn’t damn well found yet – thanks for the hunch, whoever - but that he’s still looking for.
He thought he found it when he found the church. Saint Michael the Archangel Catholic Church is so completely different from the one, lonely Catholic place in Windom that it kind of surprised him when he first saw it. It’s towering and Gothic; its spire looks more like it’s trying to stab Heaven in the belly than just point to it. He loves it. Loves the statue of Michael throwing down Lucifer that stands right in the middle of the altar – a giant ‘fuck you’ to the Devil.
He’s there when he’s found. There’s a flapping of wings and a guy in a trench coat is suddenly there. Only he’s not a guy, and Adam can see the wings arching out of his back that prove it. They’re huge. Four, massive expanses of gun-metal grey feathers, flecked on the underside with speckles of robins-egg blue. This guy is the first angel he’s seen since the Cage spat him out, and Adam’s kind of amazed that he can see him at all. The real him, not the meat in a trench coat that he’s wearing. The angel is a bright, frightening thing peering out from behind blue eyes, and Adam curls an arm around himself even though he knows it’ll do jack shit if the angel decides to attack - and he might, since angel-human hybrid babies are abominations, and all.
“I am Castiel,” the angel says, and that’s when Adam realises that he’s met the guy. Kind of. He’s seen the meat suit before, back when he couldn’t see angels for what they really were, and there’s a dim flash of recognition from the graveyard when Michael was in charge too. This is the guy who hit him with a burning bottle of holy oil.
That, unsurprisingly, doesn’t make him feel any better. Not in the slightest.
“What do you want with me?” he asks, and he hates that he sounds scared. He hates it. But he does, and he is.
He loves his baby. Hell, he still loves Michael, even if the great winged dick did get him pregnant and then not answer his prayers. He loves his baby because it’s his. It’s Michael’s. It’s a living, squirming thing inside of him. It thinks that three in the morning is the perfect time for kidney punching. It makes him spend money he can’t afford on this black-brown British goop called Marmite that tastes like the inside of an old beer barrel and yet somehow satisfies his cravings like nothing else. He doesn’t want angels near his baby, let alone standing over him while he’s in church, mid-way through a sucky and embarrassing prayer to its father.
The angel Castel just cocks his head to the side and stares at him. “Dean asked me to find you,” he says. “He claimed you were carrying a nephil. I did not believe him, but he was right.”
Angel-baby kicks and squirms. Adam feels the skin of his bump stretch and sink as it moves and tries not to think of how much of a walking horror movie he’s become. He’s learned the hard way that actually trying to watch his kid move beneath his skin just leads to a one-way trip to vomit-land.
He strokes the shifting skin and shudders.
“I did not think that Michael thought highly enough of humans to mate with one,” Castiel continues.
Adam grits his teeth in response. He’s not sure, out of the whole Apocalypse incident, if this angel ever even met Michael. It’s impossible to say. The best defence he has is, “I may be forgettable, but I do have actual, appealing qualities you know.”
And it sucks. More than his praying does – even if he has kind of been getting the hang of it over the last seven and a half months.
It makes him feel better that Castiel apparently doesn’t notice this epic suck, and instead nods like what Adam said makes perfect sense to him.
“Your brothers are worried for you,” he says.
“My brothers are worried about my kid turning out to be some kind of hideous monster,” Adam corrects. “Just in case they have to kill it, you know? I mean, it’s not like they cared that I was in Hell, so why start now? It’s just inconvenient.”
“They are good men.”
“That doesn’t mean shit,” Adam replies. “I was plenty good, and look what happened to me. Or did you think I chose this?”
The angel just studies him some more. There’s no holy oil in sight, though, and no blade slipping out of his sleeve, so he turns away and looks back at the statue instead. It – like the window back in Windom – looks nothing like the real Michael, but the grief in the angel’s expression as he stands over his fallen brother is more true to life than the artist probably realised.
“If you came to ask if he’s free too,” he says, “I don’t know. I haven’t seen or heard anything that would suggest it. I just woke up at home like nothing had happened.”
He looks round again, and Castiel is gone. Figuring that that was the answer he was looking for, Adam sits back in his pew and stares up at Michael and, damn it, blinks back tears that form in the corners of his eyes. He’s not going to cry. It’s hormones or something; not a vicious squeezing in his chest that leaves him breathless and doubled over his bump.
“Come home, already,” he whispers.
and your great love for God and people.
When he arrives back in his apartment, there are Winchesters. Winchesters and groceries, and Adam’s both amused, enraged, and entirely too tired to deal with this crap. He glares, heads for the food, and winces at the sight of bell pepper nestled proudly amongst associated vegetables.
“We figured you could use some vitamins,” Sam says, at the same time Dean says “You look like Hell.”
They glare at each other, and Adam sighs. There’s probably no getting rid of them – the angel undoubtedly has something to do with this, and it’s not like they were planning on letting him get away.
“Endearing, but I’m allergic to peppers,” he says. “Unless you really are planning on killing me and the kiddo – which, whatever, I wouldn’t be surprised – I’m going to say no thanks.” The next bag, however, reveals hamburgers, and he can almost forgive them. Almost.
“I don’t want your help,” he says. “Or need it. So why are you here?”
“You’re family,” Dean says, and it actually makes him shudder.
“Pull the other one,” he says.
Neither of them try and offer an explanation or an alternative, and they don’t stop him when he rips open the cellophane around the burgers and starts frying them off. He scrapes a thick layer of marmite over the bottom side of his bun; peanut butter on the top, and when it’s all said and done it’s the most gloriously disgusting thing he’s ever had. Baby-angel makes some kind of flipping movement that causes his bump to veer alarmingly to the left, and the expressions on his brothers’ faces make him snort. Again. He has a feeling he’ll be doing that often.
“He has at least six limbs, you know,” he says, patting his belly.
Sam, who stole back the pepper and proceeded to lace his burger with it – the heathen – looks faintly ill. “It really is Michael’s?”
“Nah, guys get pregnant all the time and I’m just fucking with you,” Adam replies, rolling his eyes and sharing a look with Dean who – while apparently appalled with the whole situation – at least seems to believe him.
He’s not going to explain any more than he already has. These two don’t get the memories. They don’t get the illusions of sunny days and grass under bare feet; of college lectures spent with Michael’s hand on his knee and his bed in his dorm room rumpled under the weight of a hundred red wings. They don’t get the touches and the kisses and the laughter of two desperate beings trying to make Heaven out of Hell.
Those memories are his. His and Michael’s. There’s something too sacred about them to share.
Still, he doesn’t kick Sam and Dean out. He figures they’ll go when they go. Either there’ll be a monster more interesting to hunt than one that’s still in the womb, or they’ll figure out that angel-baby isn’t a monster after all and just let them live. Adam knows it’s not like they’re staying for him.
They don’t buy peppers again, though, which is kind of nice of them.
Their presence is kind of irritating, though. He’s in pain. They’re making him paranoid as all Hell, and that’s on top of angel-baby squashing his internal organs in all the wrong directions. He’s tired and he hurts, and he avoids them as much as he can when they’re camped out in his living room. He’s hurtling towards what he assumes is his due date, he misses his Mom and desperately wants her with him even though he knows he can’t have her, and he’s got no idea how he’s supposed to get this baby out of him. C-Section, presumably, but he’s not too happy with the idea of gutting himself. Or getting anyone to gut him.
He goes into labour in late evening, about a week into his eighth month. At least, he presumes it’s labour. It’s like the cramping he’s had throughout his pregnancy, only a hundred times worse, and it rips through his abdomen with little regard for his safety or dignity as he doubles over screaming in the middle of an icy street. He’s on his way to church, driven out of his home by a God-awful restlessness and the omnipresence of his brothers and the smell of Dean’s chilli-fries. The pain lasts longer than a normal cramp would, but it does eventually end. He straightens, fixes his gaze on that knife-sharp spire, and forces himself to walk on.
“Michael,” he snarls through gritted teeth, “get here. Now.”
There’s no response before he makes it into the church. He pushes open the door and lets himself in, and he’s swallowed up by shadows and flickering candlelight. Another contraction sends him to his knees as his belly seems to fold in on itself. It dips in at the sides in a way that’s supposed to be physically impossible for the very good reason that it hurts like fuck. He swallows his scream, but he can’t stop himself from crying. Hot tears spill down his face – he feels like his waters should have broken, but there’s nowhere for them to go. They – along with angel-baby – are trapped inside of him.
He’s going to die here.
He fucking crawls to the altar. Rolls himself into a half-sitting position on the steps because lying on his back does nasty shit to his spine these days, and he tilts his head back to stare up at that beautiful, mournful face.
“Michael,” he says. “Michael.”
It lasts for hours. He drifts between contractions, through memories; through rage and despair as the reality of what’s happening really hits him. He remembers thinking that he was sick, back at the beginning of his pregnancy, with something that was probably fatal – he hates that he was kind of right.
He doesn’t want to die. Again. He wants to hold his angel-baby in his arms and be a parent. Hell, he wants to name the kid something other than angel-baby, but less corny than Angela. Or Angelo. Fuck no to both of those.
He can feel himself getting weaker. When black spots start appearing in front of his eyes, he figures he’s been internally bleeding for a while. He grimaces against another contraction, and slumps against the steps when it fades. The movement sends his thoughts scattering, and a phrase he learned when he was first out of the Cage and learning how to pray spirals though his brain.
It’s worth a shot, right?
“And since you are God’s messenger for the care of His people, we – I – entrust to you these special intentions,” he whispers.
He wakes up to the feel of sunlight on his face, and he thinks he must be dead. Or worse – back in the Cage in another illusion. He’d have Michael, then, but the archangel probably won’t keep the hallucination going after Adam punches him for putting him through all that shit.
He opens his eyes slowly, and stares up at a vaulted ceiling decorated with elaborate Gothic carvings. The light on his face is from a stained glass window, and even though it’s got to be time for prayers, the place is deserted except for him.
And for Michael. Dark haired and dressed in denim and a white cotton T-Shirt, the archangel is looking up at the depiction of himself on the altar. His wings fill the church, flexing and rustling over each other and making a noise that sounds like a flock of birds. Adam’s hand goes to his stomach on autopilot, and he’s surprised to find it flat again. Hell, he’s surprised to be toned - it’s something he hasn’t been in a long, long time. Apparently, though, Michael was a big enough fan of his abs to heal him all the way after…after performing an emergency C-Section in a church? With…something?
Adam pushes himself up and clambers to his feet, and relishes how easy the movement is.
“Good timing,” he says.
Michael turns to look at him. There’s nothing human left in his vessel’s bright green eyes, but unlike with Castiel, Adam’s not afraid of that. Mostly because he’s used to it; partly because of the tiny bundle cradled in Michael’s arms. Angel-baby.
“I heard your prayers,” Michael says. Adam wants to swear at him for that just on principal, but Michael continues before he can. “I would have come earlier, but I was occupied.”
“Do I get to know with what?” Adam asks, because from the mutterings of his brothers he’s fairly sure that it hasn’t been Heaven.
“Creating vessels,” Michael says. “For myself and for –“ He looks down at their baby, and Adam peers down along with him.
There’s a gratifying lack of extraneous limbs. Actually, angel-baby looks kind of adorable. He’s smooth-skinned and glowing with a kind of angelic radiance; not red and wrinkled, but that’s probably because the vessel didn’t have to suffer through anything as traumatic as childbirth. He’s got tiny hands and tiny toes, and a dusting of fair hair on the top of his head. He’s a thousand times more perfect than Adam had expected, and he reaches out a finger to touch his son’s pudgy cheek.
He’s falling in love all over again.
“We made a thing,” he says. He’s a little bit proud of that.
“He is a nephil,” Michael tells him, because he’s an angel and ‘literal’ doesn’t quite describe it.
“I know,” Adam says. He can’t resist any more and he scoops angel-baby straight out of Michael’s arms; cradles him to his chest and supports his head like all the parents on TV tell you to, and when he does he feels little bumps on his back under the skin. “What’s on his back?”
“Wing buds,” Michael tells him. “He will have many, and be strong.”
“I thought nephilim were a bad thing,” Adam says, even though he can’t imagine his baby being bad for anything. Funny, that, since he nearly died last night.
“Father has given us a second chance,” Michael says. “This child is a part of that, though I do not know the Wording of His Plan.”
Adam feels the capital letters like weights on his soul, and he looks up into Michael’s eyes. The archangel is frowning. He doesn’t like not being in the know, but Adam thinks he can see the sense in it. If he dares to apply human logic to the Will of God – and let’s face it, he wouldn’t be the first – then having seen what happened when Michael did know the plan, then having him not know might be good insurance for the rest of the planet.
And who knows? Maybe parenting will give angel-boy a crash course in free will and all that jazz. It’s definitely going to be an education for Adam.
“We should name him,” he says, because he’s not about to debate theology with an archangel. Not yet, anyway.
“Angel chicks are Created knowing their names,” Michael says, and Adam sighs. Education.
“He’s a nephil. Humans name their children. And since he’s not in a form that can tell us, we should give him a name that’s not angel-baby so that we can actually call him something. If he wants to tell us his angel name later or whatever, then that’s cool. But angel-baby needs to go.”
Michael nods. And thinks. And a crazy idea crosses through Adam’s mind that’s both so good and so insane that he thinks he might not have entirely recovered from the birth after all. He bites his tongue a moment longer, just to see if Michael thinks of something, but the archangel is silent except for the susurrus shifting of his wings.
“How about Luke?” Adam says before the silence can stretch out too awkwardly. Michael stares at him. “After your brother.”
After the fallen archangel still, hopefully, raging in the depths of the Cage; after the brother Michael loves above all his legion others. After Lucifer, who – in a crazy, sideways way of looking at things – brought them together.
“Luke,” Michael says. He looks down at the nephil in Adam’s arms, and Adam thinks he can see a bit of pride in those eyes.
“Yeah,” Adam says. “Luke Milligan. Sounds alright, doesn’t it?”
“It is…suitable,” Michael agrees after another moment of staring. “Yes.”
His hand brushes Luke’s forehead in the tenderest of gestures. There’s a tiny flare of white light under his fingertips, and Adam has a sneaking suspicion that some kind of blessing has just gone down. He smiles, unable to stop himself, and leans forward to touch a kiss to Michael’s cheek.
It’s different, doing this in a body instead of just having his soul open to the archangel’s power, but he can still feel the grace running beneath Michael’s skin. He can smell leather and motor oil and a little touch of Old Spice.
He can smell home.
Michael’s arm slides around his waist. He might still be an angel, and an awkward one at that, but Adam had coached him gently into the art of physical affection. It helps that he can see and hear Michael’s wings folding around them to form a cocoon of red feathers.
“Take us home?” he suggests, pressing his face into the crook of Michael’s neck.
Huge wings beat with a sound like thunder, and the Church of Saint Michael vanishes from under their feet.
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Date: 2014-10-09 03:58 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2014-10-09 10:26 pm (UTC)From: