Fic - Crossing the Rubicon
Title: Crossing the Rubicon - Epilogue
Author: Lady Eternal
Rating: NC-17
Pairings: Dean/Castiel, Sam/Gabriel
Word Count: 2,907 - this part
Spoilers: If you’ve watched all of Season Five, none. Specific spoilers for episode 5x18.
Warnings: possible abuse of expository devices, rough sex, angst, canon minor character death, OMCs
Disclaimer: If I owned Supernatural, certain events would NEVER have happened and there would be unabashed pr0n. I own little more than a tabby that gets destructive when he feels ignored and am only playing with this world for my own amusement and the free entertainment of others.
Author’s Note: Angelic Mates ‘verse version of Point of No Return. This fic has been circling around my WiP folder for a while, and it’s finally where I want it. Thanks for that in no short supply go to my beta, secondplatypus, who is an unconquerable soul. Hope you all enjoy.
Feedback is adored, so if you like the fic, please comment! And the more details the better; I love knowing what people like about my work.
Part One ~ Part Two ~ Part Three ~ Part Four ~ Part Five ~ Part Six ~ Part Seven ~ Part Eight
~ooooOOOoooo~
The shrill, high-pitched scream and blinding light overtook everything. Adam refused to flinch or weep or cower. He had chosen this: not for the world, but for his brothers; and he would not let this archangel see him afraid.
Sensation faded, the air still ringing around him. Adam’s facial muscles relaxed slower than the rest of him, confusion creeping over him at the realization that he still felt like himself. Or at least he thought so. He didn’t seem to feel any different, or displaced within his own body or…
“Hello, Adam.”
His eyes snapped in the direction of the voice as Adam stepped back. The man standing before him, a few feet too close for Adam’s liking but not close enough to really be a threat, was gazing at him with an unreadable, somehow serene expression on his face.
It was a painfully beautiful face.
Bathed in a shimmer of light, like sunlight reflected off a pool of water, the skin was somewhere between alabaster and golden, touched here and there with freckles. The hair faming the face and falling past his broad shoulders was a wave of pure gold, like a wheat field rippling under the autumn sun. High cheekbones, patrician nose, eyes that were perfect almond in both shape and color. The kind of eyes that had lived through far too many wars, but whose earthy nut-brown depths showed none of the personal Hell those wars had wreaked. Showed only the kind of calm and competence that could make one believe an impossible battle wasn’t so impossible after all, just because this man was there.
Adam stood his ground, unwilling to show anything other than defiant stoicism. He refused to acknowledge fear, ignored the overwhelming beauty and presence.
It was very hard to not give in to the voice that whispered in his mind: This is Michael. The actual archangel. Real proof that God exists, that miracles happen, that where you were was Heaven. This is an angel of the Lord…
Slowly, with grace that would put fairy tale princes to shame, Michael turned and walked to the body of the angel Dean had killed. Sadness so infinite that it made Adam want to cry out suffused that ageless face, and long fingers brushed over Zachariel’s fallen form.
“You tried, Brother,” Michael murmured, his voice gentle but strident. “May the light of your grace find our Father; may He absolve you of your faults and failures in His service; may you be reborn by His Will when He returns.”
The ashen remnants of great teal wings seemed to dissolve, and Michael smiled once as he gazed into the wide-blown eyes of the vessel Zachariah had used. “And you, child of Edom: go now and rest in the Fields of our Father. You have served us well, and peace shall be your reward.”
A faint shimmer, and the body faded away, vanished as though it had never been there at all. Michael lingered for a moment, crouched as his eyes seemed to be reading something in the air itself, and then he stood and turned to Adam. “So… my brother Gabriel is still alive.” That beautiful face was still serene, somehow pensive rather than angry as Adam had predicted. “I always wondered. It’s good to know.”
“You never tried to find him?” Adam couldn’t help the faintly accusing tone in his voice. Gabriel had made an impression in the short time Adam had known him, and there was no mistaking how much Sam loved him.
It disconcerted Adam a little, how quickly these brothers he’d gone a lifetime without knowing had suddenly become so important to him.
“Because he didn’t want me to,” Michael replied. “Gabriel forgets that I’ve known him… all of our kin… from the first moments of their creation. I was there when each and every one was made by our Father’s Hand; I have mourned every death, and rejoiced in them as well.” Adam strangled out an outraged sound. Michael merely smiled: a smile of total peace, of absolute faith. “Every angel that dies returns to our Father, Adam. No matter where He is, no matter how angry He is with me, He will not turn away their broken graces. When this is over, they will be made new, with no memory of Father’s absence. It is a blessing I could almost envy them, were it not for the considerable chance that I will share their Fate.”
“Why?” Adam was angry, helpless in the face of such unshakable belief. “Why are you doing this?”
Michael approached him slowly, every movement a liquid, stealthy glide. A warrior poet from time out of mind, faith in his Father glowing from within. “Why… the perpetual question of children.”
“I’m not a child,” Adam protested weakly. The archangel was right there… right in Adam’s space and Adam could feel the warmth radiate through him, suffusing every pore… he wanted to fall to his knees, to swoon and say…
“We are all children,” Michael murmured. “We all yearn for answers. But we aren’t always ready for them when we ask, and yet so many of my brothers and sisters rage at my Father for not telling us what it would only harm us to know.”
He didn’t touch Adam. He didn’t need to. Adam reached out, hands latching onto the angel’s surprisingly solid forearms for support. “Please…”
A faint brush of lips on his forehead. The throbbing insistence eased, allowing Adam to breathe and his grip on Michael to loosen. When he was steadier, Michael guided Adam to a couch, pressing him down and letting one of his golden wings furl out to wrap around the young human’s shoulders. “You are much like your namesake, little nephew,” Michael observed gently. “For that, I decided to use this in-between space to take what fleeting form I can, and I will tell you what I am able. But there are some things I cannot tell, and others I will not, and we do not have an eternity to linger here. So choose your questions with care.”
Adam took a breath, steadied himself. He was, against all sanity, possibly the last chance anyone had of getting through to Michael. He wasn’t going to let Sam and Dean down. “You’re supposed to be the good guys. You’re supposed to stop the world from burning, not help it along. Why are you doing this?”
“Most of your kind cannot see beyond the paradigm shift,” Michael replied. “You, Adam, should be able to. You were in Heaven before I had need to call upon you. You remember it. Would you not want all humans to have the same happiness? To be content, forever enveloped in the perfect place our Father’s love has created for them?”
“I didn’t want to go there before I had a chance to live,” Adam shot back. “I was going to be a doctor; save lives. I never got a chance to do anything-”
“Were you kind to others?” Michael interrupted.
Adam blinked, feeling abruptly like he was being given a pop quiz. “Um… maybe. Sometimes.”
“Those kindnesses moved beyond yourself, Adam. All good does, as much as evil. And Death obeys laws deeper even than God’s, laws which have no care for age or accomplishment. “He regarded Adam with somber brown eyes. “You’re asking the wrong questions, little one.”
“I don’t know what you want from me!” Adam shouted, bursting up from the couch and rounding on the angel. “I was just a kid with a deadbeat dad who showed up every so often to take me to a ball game. Just a kid who wanted to be a doctor and help people, who needed financial aid to go to college and wanted to get past third base before I hit med school. I had a mom and friends and a normal life and I want them back! I want them back…”
There were tears on his cheeks as Michael watched him, slowly standing to reach out and brush them away with gentle fingers. “I know.”
“Those… things ate her,” Adam accused. “They ate her and I wasn’t there… and then they ate me.” He looked up at Michael, accusation etched into heart-broken blue eyes. “Why did you let it happen? If you needed me to be born in the first place, where were you when I was getting eaten alive? Where were my brothers? Where was anybody?”
“Do you remember it?” Michael asked.
“What?” Adam’s face knitted in confusion at the question.
“Do you remember how it felt to be eaten alive?”
Adam started to say yes. Stopped. He knew it had happened, like he knew that earthquakes happened on fault lines or that his mother’s father had died of a heart attack just a year after he’d been born. But the immediacy of the experience, the sensation memory of teeth sinking in and tearing away chunks of his living flesh, the scent of his own blood and the feel of his excrement as panic and pain had taken root…
He didn’t have any of that. It simply was no longer there, couldn’t be accessed no matter how hard he shook the vaults of his memory.
“No,” Adam admitted slowly. “I don’t.”
“There are many things I cannot prevent, Adam, but what gifts I can give, I do.” Michael brushed at the drying tear tracks again. “Your mother doesn’t remember, either, and she is safe. Happy in her own Heaven, her reward for delivering you safely unto the world.”
“You can’t get me to say yes with just her anymore,” Adam countered, pulling back a step. “My price is higher now.”
Michael’s ageless brow furrowed unhappily. “Is that what you think? That I come seeking your flesh like a man seeks a whore, offering a pittance in the hopes of fleeting gratification?” Adam shifted uncomfortably. Michael closed the distance between them again. “Never. You are a gift beyond price, Adam. Precious and rare, to be granted any favor in my power to bestow as thanks for the boon I would ask.”
“Not the first choice to ask, though,” Adam reminded him archly.
“What would you have me say, Adam?” Michael returned, his tone tart with irritation.
“Quit tryin’ to court me or trick me or be all… poetical,” Adam huffed. “Just tell me what you want, and don’t lie to me.”
“Plain speech, then.” Michael sighed. “Very well. Plainly spoken? I underestimated Dean. I totally dismissed the possibility that Castiel could be swayed so completely. And Zachariel has blundered more often and completely with his task than I’d believed possible. But none of that changes what I must do, and I cannot do it without your help.”
“Why even do it as all?” Adam switched gears, hoping to convince him. That it wasn’t too late. “Dean and Sam… they’re trying to put Lucifer back in the Cage, to stop the apocalypse so everything can just go back to normal. Why not just let them?”
“Because my Father will never return to Heaven if I don’t.”
The reply was so soft, so sorrowful, so self-hating that Adam nearly missed it. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that my Father gave me an Order, little one: return your brother to the Host in humility or strike him down. Twice have I cast Lucifer down, and yet still Father remains distant, turns His face from us. A thousand apocalypses have been prepared and I have allowed them all to be averted, trying to prolong what must come to pass, hoping against hope that Father or Lucifer might relent. And now Father has left us, and it is my fault. The spheres are filled with the songs of my siblings pleading for His return. But He will not… not until I kill Lucifer.”
“Lucifer could kill you,” Adam pointed out. “Us, and then what happens to your brilliant plan?”
“If I die, then I have failed, but it will be my failure, not theirs. Father will return to protect them from Lucifer; He will not abandon them to slaughter at the hands of Hell. Either way, they will have Him back. What happens to me doesn’t matter so long as that comes to pass.”
“And what happens to me?” Adam demanded. “If your grand suicide or martyrdom or whatever goes down, where do I go?”
Michael reached up, cupping Adam’s cheek. “You will be with Him, too, little one. Your reward is assured, no matter what happens to me. I promise it, on the Grace my Father gave me. You will be safe.” Adam opened his mouth to respond. Michael cut him off. “Please, Adam. Your brothers’ intentions are good, but even free will and destiny must be in balance. I cannot do this alone, and yet I cannot compel you. I can only ask.
“I will do anything you wish, grant you anything you desire. Only please help me finish this. Help me fix the mistake I made. Help me bring my Father back to those that need Him. Please, nephew. Please.”
Adam shook, the press of Michael’s grace stirring inside him again. He wanted… “You have to promise me that you won’t hurt them.”
“Who, little one?”
“Gabriel, Castiel, Sam and Dean. The people helping them… angels, too. You have to promise me that you’ll leave them be, let them stay together. I won’t do it if you don’t promise.”
“Adam…”
“You said anything,” Adam accused. “I don’t care how pissed you are at them. They’re just trying to do what’s right. You fuck people over for that, and there’s no point to any of this.”
“All right,” Michael agreed. “So long as they do not side with Hell, I will not act against them, nor will I order their punishment for their rebellion. They will be safe to spend eternity together, whatever happens.”
“I do want to at least see my mom when this is over,” Adam added. “I wanna see for myself that she’s okay.”
“Easily granted.”
“And I want you to wait as long as you can before going after Lucifer,” Adam finally tossed out, vaguely breathless at his own daring. “Give them as much time as possible to pull the plug on this clusterfuck.”
“Adam.” Michael’s tone was slightly reproving. “All things die eventually, Adam. That includes the world my Father made for you and your kind.”
“You have to give them a chance,” Adam insisted. “You want my meat? That’s my price: all of it.”
Bright eyes searched Adam’s face, and then Michael sighed in resignation. “You would be just as stubborn as him,” he muttered indignantly.
“The first Adam?”
“No,” Michael replied sourly. “That recalcitrant eldest brother of yours.”
Adam found himself grinning. “Runs in the family, I guess.”
“I suppose so.” Michael squared his shoulders, nodding. “Clemency, as much time as I can give this ‘Team Free Will’, and you will see your mother when all is done. You have your bargain, Adam.”
“Then you’ve got a body.” Michael nodded again, stepping closer, and Adam balked. “Wait…”
“What’s wrong now?” Michael’s expression tightened, his pale lips drawing into a slightly impatient line.
“This is gonna sound so lame,” Adam complained, then bit his lip before asking, “but… does it hurt?”
The impatience in Michael’s face melted into a smile, just the softest curl of those perfect lips, and then Adam was drawn into his arms. “No, little one,” he assured Adam softly. “It won’t hurt.”
A touch of lips, coming against his mouth before Adam realized it was happening. It was warm, electric, a bath of light and shimmering soft energy and Adam lost track of it as it wrapped him up, enveloped his senses and nestled him into safety…
And then it eased, just a little, until Adam felt like he was resting in the hammock at his Uncle Rory’s lake house on a summer afternoon. It was peaceful, and everything he might need to worry about was very far away. The cicadas buzzed in his ears, and Adam sighed before settling in for a long, pleasant nap.
* * *
Michael opened his flesh eyes to gaze at his surroundings. The Room was gone, being of no more use. Adam was at peace within him, though he knew that would not last until the end of their journey together. He would need all of his strength to see this through. But for now, he could conserve that strength. With a silent flutter of great wings, Michael took to the air. He had the time, and promises to keep.
And he wanted to see his brother just once more before he destroyed the second piece of his heart that he’d ever given away.
If Lucifer knew he was there, his little brother did nothing about it. Perhaps he was too prideful to see Michael as a threat even now. Perhaps he was in no more hurry to see the end of this road than Michael was. But Michael was glad, whatever the reason. It allowed him to store up one last glimpse, seeing through the crumbling corpse that was his brother’s current vessel to every nuance of his brother’s true form: all fierce beauty and luminous grace.
A final memory to carry him through the end. Surely his Father would not begrudge him that.
By the time Lucifer turned and might have seen him, Michael had flown far, far away.
Author: Lady Eternal
Rating: NC-17
Pairings: Dean/Castiel, Sam/Gabriel
Word Count: 2,907 - this part
Spoilers: If you’ve watched all of Season Five, none. Specific spoilers for episode 5x18.
Warnings: possible abuse of expository devices, rough sex, angst, canon minor character death, OMCs
Disclaimer: If I owned Supernatural, certain events would NEVER have happened and there would be unabashed pr0n. I own little more than a tabby that gets destructive when he feels ignored and am only playing with this world for my own amusement and the free entertainment of others.
Author’s Note: Angelic Mates ‘verse version of Point of No Return. This fic has been circling around my WiP folder for a while, and it’s finally where I want it. Thanks for that in no short supply go to my beta, secondplatypus, who is an unconquerable soul. Hope you all enjoy.
Feedback is adored, so if you like the fic, please comment! And the more details the better; I love knowing what people like about my work.
Part One ~ Part Two ~ Part Three ~ Part Four ~ Part Five ~ Part Six ~ Part Seven ~ Part Eight
~ooooOOOoooo~
The shrill, high-pitched scream and blinding light overtook everything. Adam refused to flinch or weep or cower. He had chosen this: not for the world, but for his brothers; and he would not let this archangel see him afraid.
Sensation faded, the air still ringing around him. Adam’s facial muscles relaxed slower than the rest of him, confusion creeping over him at the realization that he still felt like himself. Or at least he thought so. He didn’t seem to feel any different, or displaced within his own body or…
“Hello, Adam.”
His eyes snapped in the direction of the voice as Adam stepped back. The man standing before him, a few feet too close for Adam’s liking but not close enough to really be a threat, was gazing at him with an unreadable, somehow serene expression on his face.
It was a painfully beautiful face.
Bathed in a shimmer of light, like sunlight reflected off a pool of water, the skin was somewhere between alabaster and golden, touched here and there with freckles. The hair faming the face and falling past his broad shoulders was a wave of pure gold, like a wheat field rippling under the autumn sun. High cheekbones, patrician nose, eyes that were perfect almond in both shape and color. The kind of eyes that had lived through far too many wars, but whose earthy nut-brown depths showed none of the personal Hell those wars had wreaked. Showed only the kind of calm and competence that could make one believe an impossible battle wasn’t so impossible after all, just because this man was there.
Adam stood his ground, unwilling to show anything other than defiant stoicism. He refused to acknowledge fear, ignored the overwhelming beauty and presence.
It was very hard to not give in to the voice that whispered in his mind: This is Michael. The actual archangel. Real proof that God exists, that miracles happen, that where you were was Heaven. This is an angel of the Lord…
Slowly, with grace that would put fairy tale princes to shame, Michael turned and walked to the body of the angel Dean had killed. Sadness so infinite that it made Adam want to cry out suffused that ageless face, and long fingers brushed over Zachariel’s fallen form.
“You tried, Brother,” Michael murmured, his voice gentle but strident. “May the light of your grace find our Father; may He absolve you of your faults and failures in His service; may you be reborn by His Will when He returns.”
The ashen remnants of great teal wings seemed to dissolve, and Michael smiled once as he gazed into the wide-blown eyes of the vessel Zachariah had used. “And you, child of Edom: go now and rest in the Fields of our Father. You have served us well, and peace shall be your reward.”
A faint shimmer, and the body faded away, vanished as though it had never been there at all. Michael lingered for a moment, crouched as his eyes seemed to be reading something in the air itself, and then he stood and turned to Adam. “So… my brother Gabriel is still alive.” That beautiful face was still serene, somehow pensive rather than angry as Adam had predicted. “I always wondered. It’s good to know.”
“You never tried to find him?” Adam couldn’t help the faintly accusing tone in his voice. Gabriel had made an impression in the short time Adam had known him, and there was no mistaking how much Sam loved him.
It disconcerted Adam a little, how quickly these brothers he’d gone a lifetime without knowing had suddenly become so important to him.
“Because he didn’t want me to,” Michael replied. “Gabriel forgets that I’ve known him… all of our kin… from the first moments of their creation. I was there when each and every one was made by our Father’s Hand; I have mourned every death, and rejoiced in them as well.” Adam strangled out an outraged sound. Michael merely smiled: a smile of total peace, of absolute faith. “Every angel that dies returns to our Father, Adam. No matter where He is, no matter how angry He is with me, He will not turn away their broken graces. When this is over, they will be made new, with no memory of Father’s absence. It is a blessing I could almost envy them, were it not for the considerable chance that I will share their Fate.”
“Why?” Adam was angry, helpless in the face of such unshakable belief. “Why are you doing this?”
Michael approached him slowly, every movement a liquid, stealthy glide. A warrior poet from time out of mind, faith in his Father glowing from within. “Why… the perpetual question of children.”
“I’m not a child,” Adam protested weakly. The archangel was right there… right in Adam’s space and Adam could feel the warmth radiate through him, suffusing every pore… he wanted to fall to his knees, to swoon and say…
“We are all children,” Michael murmured. “We all yearn for answers. But we aren’t always ready for them when we ask, and yet so many of my brothers and sisters rage at my Father for not telling us what it would only harm us to know.”
He didn’t touch Adam. He didn’t need to. Adam reached out, hands latching onto the angel’s surprisingly solid forearms for support. “Please…”
A faint brush of lips on his forehead. The throbbing insistence eased, allowing Adam to breathe and his grip on Michael to loosen. When he was steadier, Michael guided Adam to a couch, pressing him down and letting one of his golden wings furl out to wrap around the young human’s shoulders. “You are much like your namesake, little nephew,” Michael observed gently. “For that, I decided to use this in-between space to take what fleeting form I can, and I will tell you what I am able. But there are some things I cannot tell, and others I will not, and we do not have an eternity to linger here. So choose your questions with care.”
Adam took a breath, steadied himself. He was, against all sanity, possibly the last chance anyone had of getting through to Michael. He wasn’t going to let Sam and Dean down. “You’re supposed to be the good guys. You’re supposed to stop the world from burning, not help it along. Why are you doing this?”
“Most of your kind cannot see beyond the paradigm shift,” Michael replied. “You, Adam, should be able to. You were in Heaven before I had need to call upon you. You remember it. Would you not want all humans to have the same happiness? To be content, forever enveloped in the perfect place our Father’s love has created for them?”
“I didn’t want to go there before I had a chance to live,” Adam shot back. “I was going to be a doctor; save lives. I never got a chance to do anything-”
“Were you kind to others?” Michael interrupted.
Adam blinked, feeling abruptly like he was being given a pop quiz. “Um… maybe. Sometimes.”
“Those kindnesses moved beyond yourself, Adam. All good does, as much as evil. And Death obeys laws deeper even than God’s, laws which have no care for age or accomplishment. “He regarded Adam with somber brown eyes. “You’re asking the wrong questions, little one.”
“I don’t know what you want from me!” Adam shouted, bursting up from the couch and rounding on the angel. “I was just a kid with a deadbeat dad who showed up every so often to take me to a ball game. Just a kid who wanted to be a doctor and help people, who needed financial aid to go to college and wanted to get past third base before I hit med school. I had a mom and friends and a normal life and I want them back! I want them back…”
There were tears on his cheeks as Michael watched him, slowly standing to reach out and brush them away with gentle fingers. “I know.”
“Those… things ate her,” Adam accused. “They ate her and I wasn’t there… and then they ate me.” He looked up at Michael, accusation etched into heart-broken blue eyes. “Why did you let it happen? If you needed me to be born in the first place, where were you when I was getting eaten alive? Where were my brothers? Where was anybody?”
“Do you remember it?” Michael asked.
“What?” Adam’s face knitted in confusion at the question.
“Do you remember how it felt to be eaten alive?”
Adam started to say yes. Stopped. He knew it had happened, like he knew that earthquakes happened on fault lines or that his mother’s father had died of a heart attack just a year after he’d been born. But the immediacy of the experience, the sensation memory of teeth sinking in and tearing away chunks of his living flesh, the scent of his own blood and the feel of his excrement as panic and pain had taken root…
He didn’t have any of that. It simply was no longer there, couldn’t be accessed no matter how hard he shook the vaults of his memory.
“No,” Adam admitted slowly. “I don’t.”
“There are many things I cannot prevent, Adam, but what gifts I can give, I do.” Michael brushed at the drying tear tracks again. “Your mother doesn’t remember, either, and she is safe. Happy in her own Heaven, her reward for delivering you safely unto the world.”
“You can’t get me to say yes with just her anymore,” Adam countered, pulling back a step. “My price is higher now.”
Michael’s ageless brow furrowed unhappily. “Is that what you think? That I come seeking your flesh like a man seeks a whore, offering a pittance in the hopes of fleeting gratification?” Adam shifted uncomfortably. Michael closed the distance between them again. “Never. You are a gift beyond price, Adam. Precious and rare, to be granted any favor in my power to bestow as thanks for the boon I would ask.”
“Not the first choice to ask, though,” Adam reminded him archly.
“What would you have me say, Adam?” Michael returned, his tone tart with irritation.
“Quit tryin’ to court me or trick me or be all… poetical,” Adam huffed. “Just tell me what you want, and don’t lie to me.”
“Plain speech, then.” Michael sighed. “Very well. Plainly spoken? I underestimated Dean. I totally dismissed the possibility that Castiel could be swayed so completely. And Zachariel has blundered more often and completely with his task than I’d believed possible. But none of that changes what I must do, and I cannot do it without your help.”
“Why even do it as all?” Adam switched gears, hoping to convince him. That it wasn’t too late. “Dean and Sam… they’re trying to put Lucifer back in the Cage, to stop the apocalypse so everything can just go back to normal. Why not just let them?”
“Because my Father will never return to Heaven if I don’t.”
The reply was so soft, so sorrowful, so self-hating that Adam nearly missed it. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that my Father gave me an Order, little one: return your brother to the Host in humility or strike him down. Twice have I cast Lucifer down, and yet still Father remains distant, turns His face from us. A thousand apocalypses have been prepared and I have allowed them all to be averted, trying to prolong what must come to pass, hoping against hope that Father or Lucifer might relent. And now Father has left us, and it is my fault. The spheres are filled with the songs of my siblings pleading for His return. But He will not… not until I kill Lucifer.”
“Lucifer could kill you,” Adam pointed out. “Us, and then what happens to your brilliant plan?”
“If I die, then I have failed, but it will be my failure, not theirs. Father will return to protect them from Lucifer; He will not abandon them to slaughter at the hands of Hell. Either way, they will have Him back. What happens to me doesn’t matter so long as that comes to pass.”
“And what happens to me?” Adam demanded. “If your grand suicide or martyrdom or whatever goes down, where do I go?”
Michael reached up, cupping Adam’s cheek. “You will be with Him, too, little one. Your reward is assured, no matter what happens to me. I promise it, on the Grace my Father gave me. You will be safe.” Adam opened his mouth to respond. Michael cut him off. “Please, Adam. Your brothers’ intentions are good, but even free will and destiny must be in balance. I cannot do this alone, and yet I cannot compel you. I can only ask.
“I will do anything you wish, grant you anything you desire. Only please help me finish this. Help me fix the mistake I made. Help me bring my Father back to those that need Him. Please, nephew. Please.”
Adam shook, the press of Michael’s grace stirring inside him again. He wanted… “You have to promise me that you won’t hurt them.”
“Who, little one?”
“Gabriel, Castiel, Sam and Dean. The people helping them… angels, too. You have to promise me that you’ll leave them be, let them stay together. I won’t do it if you don’t promise.”
“Adam…”
“You said anything,” Adam accused. “I don’t care how pissed you are at them. They’re just trying to do what’s right. You fuck people over for that, and there’s no point to any of this.”
“All right,” Michael agreed. “So long as they do not side with Hell, I will not act against them, nor will I order their punishment for their rebellion. They will be safe to spend eternity together, whatever happens.”
“I do want to at least see my mom when this is over,” Adam added. “I wanna see for myself that she’s okay.”
“Easily granted.”
“And I want you to wait as long as you can before going after Lucifer,” Adam finally tossed out, vaguely breathless at his own daring. “Give them as much time as possible to pull the plug on this clusterfuck.”
“Adam.” Michael’s tone was slightly reproving. “All things die eventually, Adam. That includes the world my Father made for you and your kind.”
“You have to give them a chance,” Adam insisted. “You want my meat? That’s my price: all of it.”
Bright eyes searched Adam’s face, and then Michael sighed in resignation. “You would be just as stubborn as him,” he muttered indignantly.
“The first Adam?”
“No,” Michael replied sourly. “That recalcitrant eldest brother of yours.”
Adam found himself grinning. “Runs in the family, I guess.”
“I suppose so.” Michael squared his shoulders, nodding. “Clemency, as much time as I can give this ‘Team Free Will’, and you will see your mother when all is done. You have your bargain, Adam.”
“Then you’ve got a body.” Michael nodded again, stepping closer, and Adam balked. “Wait…”
“What’s wrong now?” Michael’s expression tightened, his pale lips drawing into a slightly impatient line.
“This is gonna sound so lame,” Adam complained, then bit his lip before asking, “but… does it hurt?”
The impatience in Michael’s face melted into a smile, just the softest curl of those perfect lips, and then Adam was drawn into his arms. “No, little one,” he assured Adam softly. “It won’t hurt.”
A touch of lips, coming against his mouth before Adam realized it was happening. It was warm, electric, a bath of light and shimmering soft energy and Adam lost track of it as it wrapped him up, enveloped his senses and nestled him into safety…
And then it eased, just a little, until Adam felt like he was resting in the hammock at his Uncle Rory’s lake house on a summer afternoon. It was peaceful, and everything he might need to worry about was very far away. The cicadas buzzed in his ears, and Adam sighed before settling in for a long, pleasant nap.
* * *
Michael opened his flesh eyes to gaze at his surroundings. The Room was gone, being of no more use. Adam was at peace within him, though he knew that would not last until the end of their journey together. He would need all of his strength to see this through. But for now, he could conserve that strength. With a silent flutter of great wings, Michael took to the air. He had the time, and promises to keep.
And he wanted to see his brother just once more before he destroyed the second piece of his heart that he’d ever given away.
If Lucifer knew he was there, his little brother did nothing about it. Perhaps he was too prideful to see Michael as a threat even now. Perhaps he was in no more hurry to see the end of this road than Michael was. But Michael was glad, whatever the reason. It allowed him to store up one last glimpse, seeing through the crumbling corpse that was his brother’s current vessel to every nuance of his brother’s true form: all fierce beauty and luminous grace.
A final memory to carry him through the end. Surely his Father would not begrudge him that.
By the time Lucifer turned and might have seen him, Michael had flown far, far away.