A/N: WAH! Who would ever think it'd be so much fun writing something where my darling Lawrence is dead? Well, I guess it's because I still get to write about my favorite little angst-bitch Adam… And you reviewers, too, of course!

1: A Light In The Darkness

Disclaimer: Yup, I own Saw, and I'm married to Adam! (Not.)

Adam can't remember the last time he wanted to wake up when he fell asleep the night before.

Hell, he can't even remember the last time he thought he'd even be able to wake up when he fell asleep the night before.

Because what he thinks every time he falls asleep, rolled up into a ball, and sleep devours him, not slowly and peacefully, no, but like a big, merciless sack that's pushed down over his head, like a kidnapping, blinds him, immobilizes him, smothers him, is:

I'm dying.

I have to die now.

Nothing can feel this bad without being death.

But he never dies. That's the problem. If nature had followed its laws and killed whoever was weakest, he would've died, and everything had been so much easier. Everything had been better, since no one would miss him. But he lived.

He, the weakest one, lived.

And he left the strongest one, the smartest one, the best one, the only one of the two of them that fucking deserved to survive, behind.

So Adam wakes up this day, too. He lifts his head from the pillow and rubs his forehead for a few seconds before he fumbles after the pack of cigarettes on the nightstand.

He sits up without bothering to straighten up. His back is bent, it looks like a big C, his pale and he hasn't shaved in a week, since that's how long it's been since he left the apartment, and by this, he has no reason to freshen up. All in all, he looks like shit.

Ah. Who cares. As he said, he has no reason to look different. No one's around to judge him, and even if there was, people have stopped doing that, anyway. Maybe the past twenty-seven years have taught them that they shouldn't expect anything from him in the first place.

Adam draws a gratifying puff from the cigarette. Feels how the smoke fills his brain, relieved.

Well, Lawrence, he says in his mind. This is it. This is what you died for.

You died for an unemployed photographer. A photographer that actually has talent, believe it or not, but that's such a damn coward that he doesn't even manages to look for a job.

This is it. And it's not much, is it?

If you'd seen me now, you'd wished you shot me to begin with, right?

It's not really that bad. Since he got out of the bathroom, he smokes more, he drinks more, the few times he has the guts to leave the apartment, he usually stops in some alley and buys a pill for the little money he's got, sure.

And he's afraid of the dark. And every time he goes to the bathroom, he can see it.

Blood.

Tears.

Darkness.

Screams.

Lawrence's screams. Lawrence's blood.

Lawrence's hand, swaying back and forth, holding that gun.

Yes. When he's in the bathroom, Adam just has to squint to see a heart on the toilet, see the tiles get stained with grime and blood and obscurity, feel the hot, white pain in his shoulder, hear Lawrence roar, beg, crawl for that fucking creep that forced them through all that.

"There! I've done it! Now show them to me!"

Okay. That's tough. Sure. And he misses Lawrence, by God, he misses him, but it doesn't hurt much anymore. It hurts at night. So dreadfully much.

At night, he screams and cries and writhers in his bed until the sheets almost strangle him and he slides into an anxious sleep. Then it hurts. But only for a while.

It hurts for a while at night. And at daytime, he's empty. He doesn't feel anything.

But now…

Maybe it's just that thought, or it's because of the usual head-rush Adam gets after that first cigarette every morning, but either way, an old memory gets triggered in his mind, a memory he's so desperately tried to forget, for this very reason.

When he thinks about it, it hurts.

And it's not nighttime yet.

"Mr. Faulkner, I'd like to talk to you."

"Get out."

"No. I won't. I wouldn't even if I…"

"Get out."

Adam doesn't want to talk. He doesn't want to sleep. He doesn't want to swallow the pills the nurses have tried to give him for the pain in his shoulder.

Because every ounce of pain he can feel is pain he deserves. And it's still not enough, it'll still never be enough to make him and Lawrence even.

Adam will try to be in pain for the rest of his life.

And he doesn't want to talk to the cop that's sitting next to his bed with a notepad in his hand. He's seen him before, he was sitting next to Adam in the ambulance, talking to the nurses. And he probably wants Adam to talk, tell him all the juicy details about the pain, the blood, the screams, so that he can get Jigsaw and get another medal to put on his fancy uniform jacket. But Adam won't talk, and he's laying with his back facing those kind, understanding eyes.

"You don't even know what I want to ask."

"I know exactly what you want to ask!" Adam hisses."You want all the yummy details about the bathroom. You want to know how much I know about Jigsaw and how much pain Lawrence seemed to be in when he sawed off his foot," Adam continues, very picky about putting as much rudeness and sarcasm into his tone as possible. "But I'm not really in the mood, okay?"

"I know you're not, Adam," the cop says softly, and he doesn't sound like Adam's voice has affected him at all. "And I already know everything that happened in the bathroom. Doctor Gordon's foot at the entrance told us a lot."

Adam still doesn't turn around. And that almost makes him hate himself even more.

Because if the cop saw his face now, he would've left in a heartbeat. He's sure of that.

"You don't know shit about what happened in there," he says with pressure on every syllable.

And that's true.

The cop will never know what happened in there. Not even if he'd been in Jigsaw's place and looked at the whole thing through a camera. Not even if he'd been sitting with his foot in a goddamn chain with Adam and Lawrence.

Adam got a friend in that room.

He fell in love. For the first time in his life, he was purely, plainly in love.

So in love that he dared to depend on someone.

So in love that he could forget about everything else. Even the bathroom, Zep's smashed face, the pain in his shoulder. All of that went away, everything that was left was Lawrence's wide, crazy, blue eyes, his cold hand on Adam's cheek, his words: "You're just wounded in the shoulder…"

And there's no way, no way that the cop can know that.

"No," the cop says from behind him, like he's read Adam's mind. "I probably don't. I guess you can't imagine that, no matter how much you've seen before. Okay, I'll rephrase the question: How are you after what happened in the bathroom?"

Adam scoffs. The cop doesn't care how he feels, Adam knows that, and the cop does, too, because no one's cared about Adam before and no one will in the future, and he sees no reason that would change just because he's got a bandage over his shoulder and a big, aching hole in his chest.

Adam can't cry anymore, though.

The tears started streaming down his face when he saw Lawrence, and they kept going until he came to the hospital. But they've stopped. Finally.

He's drained of tears.

But the weird thing is, he's more full of words than he's even been before, when he's lived his life in silent hatred. And suddenly, he can't keep them bottled up anymore, they're pouring out of his mouth, even though he's still talking to his own hand.

"How the fuck do you want me to answer that?" Adam almost yells. "You want me to say that I'm fine? In that case, I have to disappoint you, officer. Because I'm not fine, I'm fucking crappy, I have a damn bullet in my shoulder and a whole bunch of fucking nurses going up my ass about all their pills that don't fix anything, anyway, not to mention all these cops that want to know as much as possible about what happened to me and…"

And there, he stops like someone has switched off a radio.

Adam can't say Lawrence's name.

Lawrence is sacred. Adam won't say his name, he'll settle for thinking it, day after day, for the rest of his life.

"It's what happened to doctor Gordon that shakes you up the most, isn't it?" The cop asks gently.

Adam doesn't answer. The cop's touching a very soar spot, and red, hot blood is pulsing from it, fills him from the feet up, makes his soul all black.

It hurts.

It hurts so bad.

Adam can almost feel the cop's hesitation before he puts his hand on his shoulder. And he doesn't have the energy to shrug it off, even though it's the shoulder with the bandage on it. He doesn't have the energy for anything.

"I know how you feel, Adam," the cop says compassionately, and Adam wants to turn around and punch him, because he's heard that so many times. "Better than you think."

"Oh, really?" Adam hisses, and now, he does shrug the hand off.

He doesn't manage to stop himself before he also spits out:

"Have you also lots your only friend in a psycho's fucking game?"

He doesn't expect an answer. He expects to hear a chair being pushed back and then the door shutting, but instead, he hears the cop's gentle, careful voice say:

"My husband was killed three years ago, Adam."

Then, Adam feels all reluctances fall apart.

The cop has taken all Adam's curses, all his hissing pushing-aways, and thrown them aside, revealed the big, black, overwhelming sorrow that Adam feel and that he refuses to admit.

Because he knows.

The cop knows.

And Adam has to turn around and look at him for the first time since he got in.

He's pretty handsome. In the lack of light, his sandy hair almost looks black, but Adam can still see his clear, ice blue eyes, they shine through the darkness, straight onto Adam.

"What?"

"My husband," the cop clarifies, his face blank. "He got killed in a street robbery three years ago. So I know how you feel."

Adam opens his mouth. He doesn't know how to answer that. No one has ever talked about something this serious to him before. He doesn't really have any friends, and with the people he does meet, he rarely has anything more than a hi-what's-your-name-what-do-you-do-conversation.

Nothing like this. Adam clears his throat.

"I'm sorry, man…"

The cop nods.

"Thanks."

"But I wasn't married to Lawrence," Adam says carefully, and it sounds a bit too gloomy to be a joke, but it's hard to say what else it should count as.

The cop smiles faintly.

"No. Adam, I have to go now, but…"

"Aren't you going to ask me about the bathroom?" Adam asks stupidly and looks at him with wide eyes to get a clearer view of him through the darkness.

The cop smiles again.

"No. I'm on this case, but my colleges have actually taken care of everything. I just wanted to see how you were feeling. It can't be easy… I know you don't have a very big social life, so when you lost Lawrence…"

He says Lawrence's name so casually. Like they were talking about a friend of them. And the weird thing is, it doesn't bother Adam at all. It feels like they're talking to someone they both know, like they're sitting in a bar, both holding a beer, and Lawrence will soon walk in and join them.

"Adam," the cop says and lays a card on his nightstand, "as I said, I have to go now, but if you feel bad and need someone to talk to…"

Adam sends the card a quick glance.

"You don't have to…"

"Just take it," the cop says.

Adam leaves it lying. But he actually doesn't follow his natural instincts and throws it away.

"What's your name?" he asks and looks up at the cop's darkened face.

"Jake," he replies with one of those small smiles. "Call me whenever you want. If we are to be completely honest, I'm a pretty mediocre police, so I'm free most of the time."

Adam smiles weakly.

He knows he shouldn't even consider taking that card. Or even do anything except snapping at Jake every chance he gets.

He knows he doesn't like asking for help. That if he bet all the odds and called Jake, he'd hate himself afterwards.

But Jigsaw has made him stopped behaving like himself at all. Because when Jake raises his hand in a small wave and leaves, the card still lays on the table.

Adam puts his hands over his eyes to hold back those stubborn fucking tears that well up and roll down, and he lays back down in bed and cranes his head back, like when you try to stop a nosebleed.

Come on, he thinks angrily and puts the cigarette on the floor, because suddenly, everything's so miserable, he knows no nicotine in the world can help him.

We've been through this. It's supposed to hurt like hell at night, but at day, I'm supposed to be empty.

It's daytime now. Let me stop being in pain. Let me out of it.

Please.

Adam sobs when the pain in his chest just gets worse, when the gaping hole in his chest is filled with despair, with that big, black, overwhelming sorrow that will be there for the rest of his life.

It's not fair. It's not fucking fair.

That cutie really is an angst bitch! Anyway, review, and I'll love you forever!