"I'm fine, Sam," the young man intoned from his position on the floor, his lanky limbs tangled in the bedsheets.

"That's not what it looks like from here." Sam stood, leaning against the frame of the door, a suppressed grin playing on his lips. Adam simply huffed into the quilt, working himself out of the entangling mess. Sam's grin gave way to a creased brow. "Having nightmares again?"

Adam didn't reply, scowling at his quilt. The stupid thing wasn't cooperating and he needed a barrier between Sam's prying and himself. Pronto. Silence, no matter the thickness, never deterred him and Adam could only put up with so much.

"Adam?"

The young man looked up, angry. "Of course I'm having nightmares!" he snapped, tossing bedsheets off the floor and onto the bed. "When aren't I having nightmares!?"

Sam blanched. "Look, Adam-"

"Cram it, Sam," he said, holding back on as much venom as he could. He clambered back into bed, deliberately keeping Sam and that stupid hurt look he had to be harboring by now out of sight. "I just need sleep," he said with finality as he dropped into his pillows. Sam must've finally got the message for seconds later his door closed with a soft click.

With the air and room finally clear of the overbearing presence, Adam finally paid attention to the tension that was compressing his body; his every muscle taut and at attention, ready to fling him out of the room and to the nearest safe area.

Except, it'd never find one. There wasn't a single safe space in the world (or beyond) when your own mind was tearing itself apart with fear and horror. Not even sleep was a reprieve. His nightmares were proof of that - and the one that had seen him end up on the floor had been a doozy. At least he hadn't ended up screaming for Dean or Sam again. That always was too much to bear.

The dream was difficult to piece back together but he remembered enough to make him shiver. His mother - no, the monster that had worn her face - had chased him through his old house, the one he had left behind in Windom. Almost caught him, too, if he hadn't dodged out of the way in his dream and onto the floor in reality.

It wasn't the first time he had dreamt this. There were only so many things in his crap life that could be used against him. And he had gone through each of them at least a dozen times each, before in the cage and now in his head. His only consolation was that they felt considerably less real than they had in the cage.

The ghouls were almost a staple for the horrors that swamped him at night. He'd had worse (of course he had); worse than even his mother eating him as he screamed for her to stop, and what was WRONG with her and why was she doing this. And the inky blackness, the darkness that stuck to his skin and stained his vision. The smell of damp earth, the press of steel to his throat. The struggle to breathe … and then sudden comprehensive nothing.

Yeah, he had had worse than that. He struggled to remember the details (not that he was in any particular rush to and, hell, maybe he should quit now and not tempt fate with this train of thought) but he was well aware of the days and years he had spent dreaming for a way out. Any way to end it all.

No such reprieve in Hell, though.

At least, not until he had woke up almost a fortnight prior, sprawled on a couch with his half-brothers and their angel pal staring at him. History liked to repeat itself, Adam had thought at the time. Well, he might've in between his mind melting into a puddle of panic and cortisol. They had saved him, though, and for that maybe he should be more grateful towards Sam and Dean…

But no. Fuck that. It was their fault he had been downstairs for as long as he had. A raw rage began to boil at the bottom of his stomach that quickly turned to queasiness. He swallowed twice, pushing down any urge to expel the minimal contents of his stomach over the floor.

A knock at the door shocked him into releasing the slightest of eeps and he immediately bit down on his lip. Goddammit. That had to be Sam again. Couldn't he just leave him alone for a few more years? He rolled further into his pillows and willed Sam to go away. Another knock proved that Adam still hadn't developed the ability to control reality (he should look into that, maybe).

He rolled out of bed and trudged to the door, heavy sighs lining the way. If it was Sam - and god help him if it was - he was definitely going to have to make sure that he got the picture that he really does not need Sam to check on him every quarter of an hour or even ever. It was suffocating.

Adam wrinkled his nose when he was within a couple of feet of the door, the acrid scent of rotten eggs assaulting his nostrils. God, Sam better not have farted outside the door or it'd be another thing to shout at him over. He swung the door open, a rant on his lips for whomever was unfortunate enough to be on the other side. It never left, and with a blast of hot, dry air, it instead lodged itself in his throat.

Hell sprawled out in front of him, vast and infinite and terrible. The screams and wails of the damned punctured him, the smell of sulfur stronger as the dry wind brought it in. And standing on the threshold with crossed arms and an expectant look was… Sam? A flicker of the older brother's brown eyes to a piercing, luminous blue quickly dispelled that idea.

It was Lucifer himself.

Lucifer smiled, the act twisting Sam's face into something horrible. "Hello Adam. I wondered where you had disappeared to."

A fire exploded to life on the bookcase that had sat on the wall to the right of the door and Adam flinched, recoiling in horror. The old, dusty tomes that had been haphazardly stacked on it proved to be excellent kindling and it roiled, red and black and entirely unholy. Fissures and cracks formed their way up and down the walls and across the roof, sections falling out and exposing the tiny room to the hellish landscape.

No, Adam screamed internally, mouthing it as he backed further away. He can't be here! He had escaped! His brothers had finally saved him! He had been safe! A chorus of screams and wails, the sounds of the tortured souls of hell, tore all that away from him.

"Dean!" he shouted despite himself. Another crack snaked its way up the wall behind the young Winchester, plaster and wood crumbling out of the gap. The sudden breeze against the back of his neck startled Adam, and he tripped as he twisted to defend himself against it.

"Wow. Graceful as ever," the devil said, chuckling and giving Adam a slow clap. "C'mon Adam. I think playtime is over. I may be billions of years old, but I'm very impatient." He clicked his fingers and made a grasping motion at Adam, who immediately stood, limbs stretched out almost painfully. Adam's eyes bulged as he lost all control over his movement.

He was fully within Lucifer's control and there was nothing he could do about it.

The archangel kept one hand in a clenched fist and, with the other, gestured lazily at the walls and furniture, all of which blew outwards into the distance, leaving only the ground remaining. With another gesture, a slab of stone rose from the ground, intricate patterns carved along its sides and stained in blood. He gave Adam a predatory smirk.

"It's been so long since we had fun together," the archangel drawled. "I hope you haven't been purposely avoiding me." He looked sharply at Adam, all dark humor instantly vanishing, "You haven't been, have you?"

Adam choked on his words, all air caught in his constricting windpipe. He clawed uselessly at his throat, trying desperately to stop whatever was strangling him with a vengeance. Another gasp as he struggled to scream for help, and just as soon as the fear of suffocation set in, it ended.

Lucifer flexed his hands, opening and closing them experimentally. Adam fell bodily to the ground, sucking down life-giving oxygen, coughing and sputtering as he did. The Morningstar looked at the choking youth, the closest thing to a sheepish expression as he was capable of.

"You'll have to forgive me - I sometimes don't know myself when I get angry." The angel's eyes twinkled darkly. "But there has to be consequences for doing that."

With an immediate realization that he was able to move freely, Adam looked up at Lucifer and scrambled as fast as he could backwards on all fours. "Dean! Sam! Someone, help me!" he screamed as loud as he could.

This couldn't be happening. He was free of the cage. Lucifer couldn't be here. Sam had assured him that the archangel was still downstairs, locked in his cage, and he would never have to suffer the horror at his hand again.

Lucifer, with an exaggerated roll of his head, tsked. "Come on, Adam. You're smarter than that! Nothing I could do to you would ever compare to what you do to yourself."

"Dean, please!" Adam screamed again, body twitching and shivering in fear. Dean just needed to hear. Dean promised. He said he'd get Adam out. He said.

"Like that. That right there. You really think your-" The devil paused to fake an awkward cough. "-brothers would help you?" Lucifer laughed, high and cold. "The heat got hot and what do you know! They're the ones who put you here. You know that. They don't give a flying crap about you."

Adam shook his head fervently, though he wasn't sure why. His mind was screaming, echoing with the truth of what Lucifer was saying. There was no escape from his eternal torment. His "brothers" had never cared. The cage was inescapable. The youth choked back a sob.

"Aww, there, there Adam," Lucifer said with no sympathy. "You may have been forgotten and left for dead but let's look at the silver lining - we get to play a favorite game of yours." A flick of his wrist had Adam sprawled on top of the blood-stained stone slab. Barbed wrought iron chains animated and wrapped themselves tightly around the boy's limbs, pinning him to its surface.

Despite himself, Adam screamed Dean's name one more time as the chains tightened around his arms, drawing blood from him. This time, he was answered with the slamming of a door. His door. The door to his room. Everything swam painfully before him, his head throbbing violently as the entirety of Hell blurred together with the bunker as he knew it.

Inwards looked Dean, holding a pistol in one hand and a gleaming silver knife in the other, and Sam, doing much the same. Adam saw the typical battle-ready expression of each of his brothers mixed with concern and… horror? They must've seen Lucifer, Adam decided.

The angel rolled his eyes. "C'mon Adam. You're going to bring them into this?" Adam ignored him and croaked out to his brothers, "Help me please." He was shocked at how raw his throat was; he hadn't thought he had shouted so loudly or for so long.

Beyond the devil, Sam's mouth fell open. "Oh my god," he breathed, his hand gripping the pistol tightly.

Dean, on the other hand, acted quickly. To Adam's surprise, Dean sheathed his knife, tucked the pistol in his belt and raced over. "Hold on, small fry. We'll get you off this," he said, looking up and down the youngest Winchester's bound form. He gave a sharp tug on Adam's arm. "Sam, help! He's not moving a damn muscle."

With a start, Sam tucked away his weapons and came over to Adam's other side. He felt both of them tug downwards on his arms to no avail; he remained chained to the slab. "Maybe it's some kind of spell?" Sam asked Dean.

The eldest Winchester roughly patted down Adam and shook his head. "No hex bag. I'll check if it's another of those damned Men of Letters artifacts."

Adam blinked up at the both of them and whispered "Lucifer." His brothers exchanged a concerned glance before Dean turned away to rifle through the items on Adam's bed.

As though speaking his name were a summoning ritual (which was highly possible), the archangel spoke up. "I'm really disappointed that you chose fantasy over little ol' me. Play this silly game then. We'll just make up for time lost." With a click of his fingers, the stone slab, the chains, the hellish landscape and Lucifer himself vanished.

Adam fell heavily on the ground, painfully tearing himself out of Sam's tight grip and startling both hunters. "Adam!" he exclaimed, kneeling beside the wouinded boy. "Are you okay?"

He saw the cringe in Sam's eyes as he must have realized the uselessness of his question. He knew that had it been any other day, a scathing quip was what Sam would've deserved. But he felt small and vulnerable and his arms stung fiercely. This was not the time and he instead simply shook his head, not trusting himself to speak coherently.

"No small surprises there," Dean said, moving closer. "Help me lift him up." Wordlessly, the two Winchesters hoisted up the third brother onto his bed. Blood dripped from Adam's forearms, leaving a stuttering trail behind.

"I'll grab the medical supplies," Sam said once Adam was safely on the bed and bolted out the room. Dean nodded belatedly, turning to grab a t-shirt off the floor. It was a favorite of Adam's, something that he had actually attached himself to after… waking up on his brothers' couch. He watched as Dean proceeded to tear it into strips and, had he had the energy, he knew he'd be tearing Dean a new one. Instead, he just watched with a sad expression.

The eldest Winchester inspected his work and, seemingly satisfied, crouched down in front of Adam's bed. "You scared the crap out of us, runt." When Adam made no reply nor gave the slightest indication that he had heard, Dean snapped his fingers in the youth's face. "Hey. You still in there, Adam?"

Adam swallowed down the lump in his throat. "Yeah," he said simply. Dean nodded and held up one of Adam's arms, glancing over it. With a frown of disapproval, he began to wind one of the cloth strips around his arm, presumably to act as a temporary tourniquet until Sam arrived with the proper medical equipment.

Adam watched Dean's work silently, breaking only to say, "Not tight enough" when he prepared to tie it up. Dean paused to look at him. "Trust me," Adam added quietly. In what could now be considered a past life, he had been studying to become a doctor and while that was almost ten centuries ago to him, he at least remembered a few details.

Dean just nodded and rewound the tourniquet. Adam winced with regret as pain radiated along his arm. "Sorry," Dean said, "but it's what the doctor prescribed." He smirked at his joke.

Adam barely heard him, resting his head back and concentrating solely on the here and now - wherever it was. The pain was helping him ground himself and it helped make reality feel that shade more real. Lucifer's words continued to scream out in his head so without so much as a glance in Dean's direction, Adam asked quietly, "Did you really save me?"

The eldest Winchester stiffened and Adam shifted just in time to catch a glimpse of his conflicted expression. "Of course we did," he replied, eyes now guarded and face blank. "You're family, Adam. My brother. I'd've done the same for Sam. Hell - I did the same for Sam. There's not a goddamn thing I wouldn't do for either of you."

Family. There was that word again. The Winchesters loved to throw the word around but Adam couldn't help but feel that they had some drastically altered sense of the word. Sam frequently used it with him, as though he desperately needed to convince Adam (and himself) that it were true. It hadn't worked. He knew they all shared a parent, a bloodline, but he didn't consider them family. His only true family was in heaven, where she deserved to be but where Adam wished she wasn't. His heart ached over her death - the first time it had done so since the first year of the cage. An innumerable amount of lifetimes separated him from the deal he had made with Zachariah.

He wondered if his mom remembered him.

Sam returned at that moment, a small lockbox held in both hands, and Dean moved to give him access to Adam's wounds. Adam hissed and recoiled violently as Sam washed out the wounds, preparing them for the dressing. Having learnt his lesson, Sam gripped Adam's wrists tightly as he applied the packing and gauze. He'd have never admitted it later but as Adam watched Sam through half-lidded eyes, he was vaguely impressed that Sam knew how to treat wounds properly.

After everything was properly sealed up, Sam packed away the remaining materials and stood up. "There. All done."

"How're ya holding up?" Dean asked from his sitting position near Adam's desk.

"Better. But tired," Adam replied, clenching and unclenching his fists experimentally. No nerve or muscle damage. That was good.

Dean nodded, pushing up from the chair. "Don't scare us like that again, runt. Or I'll kick your butt instead." Sam gave Dean a disparaging look and Adam bit down on the swell of anger at having it implied that he had any choice in this.

"Sure thing," he said instead, voice dripping with sarcasm. "I'll get right on that."

"What Dean's trying to say is that we're r-" Sam began.

"Yeah, yeah," the youngest interjected. "You actually 'care'. He's just doing that big brother thing. Whatever." Adam shifted in his bed, careful not to knock his arms accidentally. "Look, I wanna get some shut eye. Would you mind?"

Sam gave him that puppy dog expression. "Alright, Adam. We'll let you get some sleep." Without another word, the elder Winchesters filed out and Adam soon drifted off into all-encompassing dreamless darkness.