Whew! It's been a while since I've written anything. To those of you who have read and enjoyed (and reviewed, especially) my fanfiction, thanks a lot! And don't worry; I'm still alive. I've just been really busy with insignificant crap that doesn't matter because it doesn't involve Adam and Lawrence. I hope all of us ChainShipping fans can keep this wonderful fandom going forever! Or at least until I die.

Quick note: This fanfic is not strictly Adam/Lawrence. Well, it is, but it's also Adam/OC later on, since Lawrence doesn't actually make it in this fic. :( As I say in my profile, I don't mind killing Lawrence off occasionally, as long as Adam finds someone else to love, but NEVER kill off Adam. NEVER Adam. Also, I don't own Saw, worst luck. I will one day, though! And by then, it'll be heavy Adam/Lawrence porn! Sweet...

X X X X X X X X X X

Adam lay facedown on the hard, tiled floor of the filthy, deteriorated bathroom, the chain around his ankle that bound him to the solid, unbreakable pipe digging hard into his flesh.

He was crying, crying harder than he ever had in his whole life. Never had he felt this scared and alone. Lawrence, the older man who had been chained by the opposite side of the room that they were trapped in, before he'd severed his own foot to escape, had left to find help for them both. Lawrence, Adam's only friend and companion, not just in this horrible place, but in the entire world. The young man had no one, hadn't since he was sixteen.

Lawrence was so calm and collected, so kind and caring, that Adam had felt closer to him than any of the men that he'd called his friends over the past years. They were all a bunch of underachieving losers, anyway, just like him, taking pictures of others, invading their privacy, just like him. They couldn't care less if went missing. They probably wouldn't even notice his absence. But Lawrence... He was just so perfect.

Adam smiled, despite the terrible situation he was in, despite how pale and sickly the surgeon had looked when he'd left, promising to come back for his cellmate, promising that they'd both be okay. That man was always so rational. It was something that Adam, being extremely lightheaded and impulsive, would have envied until normal circumstances.

Something seemed to flash in Adam's head, and he sat up, abruptly. Zep, the infamous Jigsaw Killer who had put the two men into this dreaded place, was lying dead beside the prisoner, his face mangled beyond recognition, in easy reach of the boundaries of the ex photographer's chain.

Adam had done that himself... He'd viciously beaten that orderly to death with the stone basin that he'd grabbed. He hadn't thought; all he'd cared about was stopping the bastard from killing Lawrence, and then him, probably. He didn't care about that now, though. Zep had put them and others through so much, he deserved it. At least Adam had ridded the world of one less serial killer, whether the sick bastard described himself otherwise or not.

"I help those who do not appreciate the lives they were given."

That was pretty much the personal philosophy of that man. If he found someone whom he deemed unfit to live the healthy, productive chance of life that they'd been given, then the killer would find them, and put the subjects through horrible tests that were either extremely dangerous, self-mutilating, or both. Unfortunately, Adam and Lawrence had been two such people, according to Jigsaw, so he'd chosen them, kidnapped them both from their "ungrateful" lives and brought them to this place for their so-called test.

But Jigsaw was the one who put them both in here... Surely, surely, he'd have a key to the shackle that still bound Adam. Desperately, hurriedly, too terrified and excited to care that he was touching a dead man - a man that he'd killed himself, moreover - the young man crawled over to Zep's corpse, wincing as strain was put on his injured shoulder. Lawrence had done that, but it didn't matter. They'd both been desperate. There'd be plenty of time for apologies later. Right now, all that mattered was the key.

Adam searched and searched, growing more and more desperate and afraid. He could find no key. His good hand touched on something rough and leathery, buried in one of Zep's pockets, and he pulled it roughly out to examine it. It was just a wallet. Feverishly, the ex photographer began to rummage through it.

A few notes of money, a driver's license, and other personal belongings fell out as Adam searched. Funny, he thought. Less than twenty four hours ago, he would have been ecstatic to have found free money in a helpless man's wallet. Maybe not from a dead body, but still... Now, though, all that mattered was finding the key, or even a cell phone. Money didn't mean anything to him anymore, not when compared with freedom.

The last thing that fell out of the wallet was something that made Adam's blood run cold. It hit the hard tiles with a dull thud, and Adam stared at it stupidly, trying to make sense of the situation.

A mini-tape recorder.

His heart pounding horribly in his chest, Adam slowly lifted his right hand, the one that didn't have a bullet lodged in it, down and picked up the device. A dozen different reasons as to why Zep might have one of these - this device that Adam and Lawrence had been given when they'd been brought into this game, the device that contained a tape with Jigsaw's voice on it, giving them their instructions on how his sick "game" was to be played - ran through the young prisoner's head. But out of all the wild guesses that he jumped on, only one really made sense:

Zep was a victim in this game, too.

Dull despair began to run through Adam's head, making his body shudder. If Zep had been a victim in this game, then that meant that Adam hadn't killed the Jigsaw Killer. It meant that the sick bastard was still out there. And so was Lawrence... Defenseless, weak, severely blood-deprived Lawrence, who was their only hope of escaping this place.

Slowly, numbly, as though he actually needed confirmation of this terrible theory, Adam pressed the play button on the recorder, and waited for that gnarling, scratchy voice that he knew would come.

"Hello, Mr. Hindle, or as they call you around the hospital: Zep. I want to play a game."

Every bit of blood in Adam's body seemed to stop flowing instantly. He had been right.

This horrible, horrible fact seemed to linger in the young man's mind, echoing all throughout his brain, so much so that he barely heard the voice on the recorder, droning on and on about how Zep, too, did not appreciate his life, and that he'd have to play a "game" in order to save himself from the slow and deadly poison that the killer had put in his body.

A slight noise from behind him made Adam, whose senses were enhanced greatly from all of the adrenalin and fear, turn around sharply, and the sight that met his eyes once he had almost made him faint.

The body, the body that had been lying in the middle of the room, dead from a seemingly self-inflicted gunshot to the head, a gun in one hand and a tape recorder in the other, both of which were now taken, was rising from the floor, slowly but surely, into a standing position. Adam gasped quietly, staring in wonder and terror at the new threat. None of this made any sense. How could this have happened?

Adam continued to watch, in fascinated horror, as the body, now standing, slowly righted itself. The young victim had stopped the tape player in his hand now, and the room was filled with a deafening silence that seemed little different from purgatory.

The only sound in the whole room was his own terrified pulse, and, horribly, the man - the sub-fucking-human man - ripping a piece of rubber-like materiel from his old and bold head. It came off with a rough tearing noise, and for a moment, its wearer turned his head this way and that, carefully, experimentally, before finally, disastrously, looking to Adam, who continued to watch him, frozen with terror and disgust.

"The key to that chain... is in the bathtub," the old man said slowly, nodding his head toward the dilapidated bath behind the chained man. Adam turned his eyes briefly to the tub that he had awoken in, and remembered, for the first time, the glowing, golden light that had disappeared along with the water when he, in his instinctive flailing, had pulled the plug and drained it. Horrified, the young man turned back to look at the man, the man that he now knew, beyond all doubt, was the Jigsaw Killer himself.

In some kind of semiconscious state, Adam saw that the man - the man, the man who was alive and breathing, not a dead body - was beginning to walk away, towards the door, and it was then that he realized the horrible truth: This evil person was going to leave him here, leave him here to die. He was going to shut the door of this terrible place, sealing him inside forever. And then he was going to find and destroy Lawrence, to make sure that he never found help for them both.

"I'll bring someone back, I promise. I wouldn't lie to you."

The surgeon's words rang dully inside Adam's head, and he found himself beginning to shiver violently. His hands fumbled blindly for Zep's discarded gun, and he lifted it up, its cold heaviness making his entire hand feel as dead as the situation seemed.

Jigsaw turned around, alerted by Adam's grunts of pain as pressure was put on his wounded shoulder. He began to raise something in his right hand, a small contraption that was barely bigger than his palm. His finger poised over the trigger, but the freelance photographer did not wait to find out what it was for, even though he was pretty sure that he knew already.

Maybe the Jigsaw Killer had misjudged Adam. Maybe he'd thought him incapable of recovering from such a devastating shock so quickly. Maybe he'd taken it for granted that the inexperience in handling such a weapon, or killing someone, for that matter, wouldn't matter when the user was so scared and filled with the desperate adrenalin to survive.

Either way, before the old man's finger could press on the switch of the weapon and stun his victim, Adam had already pulled the trigger of the gun. There was a deafening bang as the bullet was released, and then a dim squelching sound, similar to the sound a fish made as it flapped itself against wet cement, and the next moment, the killer was stumbling, the buzzer dropping from his hands as he began to fall backwards, a bullet caught just above his left eye.

Adam didn't wait. In his panicked state, he wasn't even sure if his bullet had hit or not, despite the obvious signs that it had. He kept on firing rounds, his hand pressing down hard on the trigger again and again, until there were no more left to fire. Jigsaw, several more bullets caught in his body, writhed on the ground where he'd fallen for a few seconds, seconds in which Adam, sobbing now, continued to press the empty trigger of the gun like Lawrence had done with Zep only minutes before, before finally lying still, his time up.

Adam let the gun fall from his bloody fingers, curled himself into a tiny ball on the damp and bloodstained floor, and began to cry quietly, not wanting to think about what he'd just done, or about Lawrence, his only friend, who had looked so pale and gaunt when he'd left, that the young man knew, deep down, that the chances of either of them getting out of this were very slim.

Wrapping his arms more tightly around himself in a hopeless attempt of comfort, Adam continued to sob, alone and terrified, as he waited for a seemingly unreachable person to help him. If this was what it felt like to be dying, then it wasn't at all peaceful and painless like people always said. It was hell.

Lawrence had no memory of reaching Tapp's body. He didn't remember crawling, more dead than alive, through the filthy sewer-like design of wherever the hell he was, leaving a thick trail of dark blood behind him from the bloody stump where his right ankle had once been. Only one thought was in his mind now, one desperate, urgent thought, which took priority over all else.

Have to help Adam.

If he didn't get help, Adam would die. No one knew they were down here, no one would come. In his warped state of mind, Lawrence didn't even think about the fact that Tapp was dead, lying there as unmoving and lifeless as Zep had been. All the surgeon cared about was the cell phone. The cell phone that he yanked roughly from the dead man's body and dialed into desperately, his exhausted mind threatening to leave him completely.

9.

1.

1.

A ringing sound.

A click, then a female voice.

"911. What is your emergency?"

Lawrence gasped into the phone, trying desperately to stay awake.

"I-I need... I need the police."

His voice cracked and trembled, but thank God, it was still audible. The woman who had answered the phone said something that could have been "one moment, please," but that the injured man was really too tired to listen to, and the next moment, a different voice was speaking. A strong, male voice.

"Police," the voice said hurriedly. "What is your emergency?"

Lawrence took a deep, shuddering breath, feeling as he did so that one hundred gallons of blood was seeping out of his body.

"There's a man locked down here," he said rapidly, struggling to keep his voice above a whimper. "He needs help. I have no idea where we are, though. Please..."

"Sir, calm down..." the voice said, sounding almost as afraid as the man he was addressing. Lawrence almost felt like crying in frustration.

"I can't be calm!" he snapped back, tears coming into his eyes as silent sobs wracked his exhausted body. "I don't have much time left! You need to find out where we are! Track us, search the city, ask people, anything! But for God's sake, hurry the fuck up!"

There was a short silence, then Lawrence heard the man on the other end talking to someone else. A few seconds later, he again addressed the surgeon.

"Sir, we're going to need a few minutes to track you. Can you wait that long?"

Lawrence bit into his lip and replied with a weak "yes," barely daring to hope.

X X X X X X X X X

Yup! Lawrence has managed to get help for Adam, but he's so weak and blood-deprived... Poor Lawrence. He's not going to make it, as I said. But he and Adam will share a moment before he dies, and Adam will go onto live, falling in love with another man, and sweet hurt/comfort shall follow thereafter. This fic is going to be LONG, since it will concentrate on Adam and the OC's relationship, and Adam's lingering trauma after what he's been through, so look forward to regular updates. P

- The OC that Adam falls in love with is going to be a cop (OMG! Spoilers!) named Leigh (who can guess where I got that name from?). I expanded on the cop idea when I read Adam Faulkner's Afterlife, by IAmMadlyInLoveWithJohnnyDepp. Damn, that's some hot angst and smut... Drools. Anyway, enough blabbing. Please continue to leave encouraging reviews, ya'll, like you did with my other two fics. It really encourages me.

I'll be updating this fic, as well as my I Would Never Hurt You one, as soon as I can. I also have many others planned, so look forward to them!