So, this is a random drabble that ended being an entire story based on an entirely different concept that I had planned. Whoops.
"Angel, you can't be serious. It's impossible."
"Nothing is impossible, dear. You should know that since you manage to break all of those laws that Newton character declared as the order of the universe."
"Fine. Nothing human is impossible for me-us- to do. But you want me to mingle with the supernatural! Are you out of your terrible fashioned sense mind?"
"Dealing with you, dear demon, for millennia means I rather have to be."
"Ouch. That stung. I demand lunch as an apology."
"I'm the only one who actually pays for lunch!"
"Hey, what can I say? You are an angel who's obsessed with spreading good deeds around. Reminds of Father Christmas."
"Please, even my fashion sense, as much as you degrade it, is better than Nicholas'."
"I'll ring him up and let him know then."
"No, you won't! And don't think I don't realize that you're trying to change the subject."
"Well, da-ble-shoot. You caught me."
"So will you do it?"
"Angel, I don't have nearly enough power to even suggest what you want me to do, let alone actually go through with it."
"So get more power. You can't leave him in there, not when he wanted nothing to do with this little spat."
"Yeah, well I wanted nothing to do with it either, and yet I still got dragged in."
"I'm pretty sure all demons were required to participate, willingly or not."
"Sadly yes. Hell usually has those do it or else deals."
"So you'll do it? You know I would try, but I can barely lift a teacup right now, let alone break into the deepest pit."
"Believe me angel. It's going to take a lot more power than that to even open the door down there. And I'm talking about a lot of power."
"You can do it. I have faith in you."
"Belief from an angel. I am very touched."
"You should be. I put in a lot of effort into making you somewhat a good bastard."
"I prefer the nickname flash bastard actually. Sounds a bit more sophisticated."
"Everyone knows that at least."
"Means my reputation has spread. Excellent."
"You wish. You should probably get going."
"Yeah. Hey Zira, what if this power is too much-"
"It won't be. You'll be fine. Stop doubting yourself, you egomaniac."
"Rude. I'm going to go now before you get even more snappy."
"Excellent decision my dear."
"Ciao then Angel."
"Good bye, Crowley. And…good luck."
"If I'm going to succeed with this, Aziraphale. I have a feeling I'm going to need all the luck the world can offer."
Adam glanced at Lucifer who was pouting in his sleep in the cage. He had been trapped down here for….well he had lost count ages before Sam was taken out of the cage for good. But since his apparent older brother had been dragged out of the deepest pit of hell, Lucifer had taken to sleeping comatose like, frowning and pouting half the time, and the other half giggling.
"He's toying with the Winchester boy." Adam's other roommate commented.
"I know. You've said so before." And he had. Hell wasn't good for Michael's mental health, anyone could see that. Unlike Lucifer, Michael wasn't able to adapt, even after the centuries, or at least the centuries that Adam thought had passed, in the cold yet burning dimension they were trapped in. Maybe it was because he thought he had failed as a son or maybe Michael was too good for hell, Adam really didn't care what the reasons were. All he knew was that Michael was self destructive, and while it was entertaining to watch the archangel that had taken over his body in order to destroy the world, it had gotten old really fast.
At the beginning, - wasn't this a song title? - Adam and Sam watched as Michael scratched at his face, wailing at his failure as a son, his nails puncturing through skin hard enough that some dim light shone through the human body of the young John Winchester. Lucifer, in the meat puppet of some dude named Nick, had screamed, far too loudly to resemble anything human and grabbed Michael, roaring in a tongue unknown to the two humans. The two of them had watched, standing – or perhaps they were sitting, it was rather difficult to tell which while in the cage – quietly as Lucifer spun Michael around into a wall that was both there and not. He never stopped yelling, not even to take a breath to gulp in the nonexistent air.
"He might have a been a football coach with a pair of lungs like that." Adam would remember that one line as the time Sam made his first joke. Of course, spend enough time getting tortured by the two most famous archangels of the Bible together, and anyone's hidden sarcastic side would shine through.
Now, it was just the three of them, and even then it ended up being more of just Adam. Lucifer had discovered a way to stick with Sam who had managed to get out of the cage via help from the horseman known as Death, by projecting himself and leaving his physical body behind as an anchor. If Michael didn't have Lucifer to bully him into interacting with his environment, the Eldest Son of God tended to lapse into long periods of silence, his fingernails inevitably digging into his skull, trying to peel his own skin off his bones until Lucifer woke and stopped him. Adam just watched it happen, never making a move to stop Michael from gorging his flesh.
He knew Sam might have helped eventually, unable to continue watching the pathetic sight of an archangel trying to kill itself while stuck in a cage in hell due to some strange morals or whatnot. But Adam wasn't Sam, and he tended to hold grudges for a long time. There was that one boy, Billy or Bob or something generic, that had made fun of Adam in school. Adam had waited four years before enacting his revenge of secretly filming Max or Joe violently hitting several other boys in the neighborhood and anonymously sending the footage to the authorities. Last he heard or remembered, that kid whose name he couldn't actually remember was stuck in juvie.
Of course he could be making that story entirely up, Adam wasn't entirely too clear on what memories were real or not. Nor did he really care.
"Have I? Must not have remembered." Michael muttered, his vessel's brown eyes boring into Lucifer's prone meatsuit.
Meatsuits? Is that what he was as well? Sounded rather carnivorous.
"You don't seem to remember a lot of things. Understandable since you are really old after all." No point in mentioning that his own memories of earth were also rather fuzzy some days; if he had ever really lived there in the first place.
"It is my punishment for failing my Father. He has seen fit to punish me and I accept his decision."
"I thought with age was supposed to come wisdom not stupidity." How could anyone be that faithful to a parent, who apparently was hardly ever there? He had seen John Winchester usually once a year and Adam had switched back and forth between admiring his dad and loathing him outright. Michael hadn't seen his Father in millennia, from the conversations he overheard Lucifer and Michael yelling at each other, and yet he was still so devoted to the bastard.
Weirdo.
"You wouldn't understand." Was all the archangel said before falling silent. Adam rolled his eyes and walked away, recognizing that Michael was about to hit his depressed mode yet again.
Sometimes Adam wished that the two would go back to torturing him, with the whole hanging him only his thumbs with rusty chains just to break the monotony and feeling of loneliness he felt more and more. Stupid Death for taking away his only other companion in this endless void of a cage.
"Psssssssss."
Huh, that was new. Adam had never heard hissing in the cage before. He wondered if this was a new sign of his insanity; hearing noises that shouldn't be heard.
"Oi, kid! Baby Winchester, look to your left." Baby Winchester? What was the point of calling him that? Nevertheless, Adam turned his head to the left expecting to be greeted by nothing but air and found himself staring at a meatsuit wearing demon with a balding head but charming face. Sort of reminded him of a snake somehow.
"I think the hallucinations are starting now. Am I finally completely loosing my mind or are you awake and bored already, Mr. Lucifer?"
"Nah, he's still being an over possessive girlfriend with the moose upstairs." This newcomer, Adam decided, did not look at his best. Which was a shame because first impressions really do matter. The demon sagged in his posture, the shoulders curled up a bit and the sides of his face and neck looked to be shiny with sweat. Gross.
"Now, I hate to barge in and be rude, but we really need to get going."
"Go…where? There's not a lot of tourist places down here you know. I heard there was some tropical beach close by, but I have yet to pinpoint its exact location." That was something Sam would say. Or maybe it was something Adam would say to Sam. He couldn't recall.
"Good grief, seems Zira was right, you are more than ready to get out of here. That level of sarcasm was just dreadful." The stranger held out a hand, and Adam stared at it.
"Have you forgotten what a human hand looks like kid?" The demon sighed.
"No, that I remember. I think. I'm just trying to figure out who you are." The only movement Adam made was a slight narrowing of his eyes.
"I'm trying to do a stupid good deed, cast my nonexistent soul to the lowest pit of hell and all that jazz for even thinking that, and rescue your sorry arse, and the only thing you can do is sit there with big eyes?"
"I didn't realize I was supposed to be doing anything different, Mr. Demon. Or am I supposed to start signing some sort of song in honor of your arrival?"
"Excuse me, we got ourselves a little sass warrior over here. I couldn't be any prouder." The demon reached out to pat Adam on his head, mostly ignoring his flinch at someone's hand coming near his head except for a slight narrowing of the eyes. "The name's Crowley, residential demon, occasional backstabber, and all around rather charming bloke. And I'm here to get your lovely little ass out of this cage."
"Er, why exactly? The only important person in the cage was Sam and he left ages ago." An opportunity to get out of the cage? Why would anyone care about Adam being stuck in the cage?
"Moose can be his usual blundering self, frolicking around in daises for all I care. Right now, I have a guilty conscience screaming in my ear every other hour or two and I really would like to kindly shut it up once and for all." Crowley sighed deeply.
"But I thought demons were incapable of having any feelings for humanity?"
"Kid, whoever said I was the one with the guilty conscience. Here's a hint for you. Never, under any circumstances, allow an angel to finally learn how to use a phone. It may take them fifty years or so to understand the concept, and then Bam! You are doomed for the rest of eternity." Crowley pulled a cell phone from his pocket, shaking his head at the numerous amounts of messages and missed calls. "Apparently Vodafone has a great connection in Hell, of course they would. Bloody bastards are universal."
"Sorry but I'm still confused over here." Adam looked around the cage. How was it that Michael didn't sense anything different, even while in one of his moods? Or Lucifer, despite being asleep?
"Good, you're not supposed to understand the supernatural. That's just unnatural. I would rather like to get going before my exceedingly lovely older brothers snap out of whatever funk they're in now, but you don't seem to moving unless you get all the facts. Smart cookie." Crowley held out a hand. "At least let's move while we talk, staying down here is taxing and I would like to save a bit of power from this debacle."
What was left for him here in this godforsaken (actually a literally representation of this place) cage? Sam had been let out forever and an age ago, and while the archangels weren't in the mood for torturing him anymore, being ignored was just as effective.
He grabbed Crowley's hand.
The demon seemed to move in no particular direction, just fading into the empty space, and Adam would have panicked thinking the demon had just left him in the cage, if he didn't see his hand vanishing as well.
"To make a long story short, an angel feels absolutely horrible about what happened to you and so made sure I went to go get you out by hounding on my ass for the past year or so. Alas, here I am, your very own rescuing party." Crowley gave a half bow as they moved through the air. "Now that explanations are done, better hold tight, kid. The wings are completely coming out now."
"The wings are what?" Before Adam finished his sentence, the scenery around them changed from a dark, gloomy almost corporate style place of ever growing dismay and terror to a place where Adam could see the sky. It was cloudy, with the sun just barely peaking through the clouds at times and he could hear birds chirping all around him.
"Welcome to South Downs, kiddo." Crowley looked exhausted, his shoulders nearly sagging forward and his face seemed gaunt somehow. But Adam barely noticed this, too engrossed in feeling the dirt underneath his shoes.
"Dears!" Someone opened the door at the cottage closest to them, hurrying out with blankets in his arms.
"Adam, meet Aziraphale; the angel who basically threatened me into getting you. Zira, Adam. Now if you excuse me, I'm calling the bed for the next two weeks." Crowley hobbled towards the cottage, leaving Adam with the new angel.
"Oh, darn it. I had everything planned out for what I was going to say, but now I can't remember a single thing!" Aziraphale muttered. "Well, hello I suppose. I'm sorry it took so long to get you out of the cage, Adam. But getting enough power to get to the dimension where the cage resides and then getting out with a passenger takes a bit more energy than either of us realized. Of course I've already sent management quite a few angry letters on the subject, not that they ever indicated of helping out or even that they had gotten my messages. They are rather rude, but I guess one grows used to it over the millennia. Would you like some tea, biscuits, hot chocolate, anything?" Aziraphale fretted about.
"Can you just tell me why you felt guilty?"
Aziraphale smiled. "You remind us of a friend of ours. He never liked hell or heaven either, even though he was drawn to both of them from the beginning. He would have been disappointed if we let someone else be dragged into the war between the celestial powers and not helped them out."
Adam found it difficult to concentrate on what the angel was telling him even if it was for a question he had asked; he was occupied with how warm the few straggly rays of sunlight felt on his shoulders and head. He was out of the cage. He was breathing real air and feeling actual rays of sun and hearing real, live animals singing to one another. Adam could see grass and he could see the sky.
And for the first time in what must have been centuries, Adam laughed.