A/N: Hey there! I've FINALLY gotten my act together and written an update on this thing! Sorry about the wait… And even though there's no SLASH in this chapter, there is… ADAM-ANGST!

7: The Monster Within

Adam silences down. Jigsaw, on the other hand, hasn't said a word, hasn't taken that mask of insensitivity off his face once during Adam's story. Like he doesn't hear him.

Like he doesn't care at all about how beautiful the thing he's now tearing into shreds once was.

Adam feels like hitting him. Okay, he's felt that since he got her, no, he's felt that for the past year, but now, he really feels it, pure and icing and vibrating, gets past the pain in his arm, as overwhelming, piercing as the lust he felt for Lawrence that night he just told about.

Hatred is cold. Fear is cold. Adam's sweating, but his teeth are chattering, his fingers are stiff and chilling, because he's so damn cold. So damn hateful.

And the remorse for that makes him even colder.

Because he doesn't want to hate. Lawrence wouldn't have wanted him to hate.

That was another thing that made him feel like the child in their relationship. He was the one who kicked and screamed, the one that threw things into walls, tore at his own hair, clawed his own arms until warm little drops dribbled down his cold fingers, the one who lifted a toilet lid, didn't think, didn't regret, only hated, only hit, only hit, only killed-killed-killed.

The one who couldn't even pretend like he didn't have bad dreams. Couldn't even pretend that when he was sleeping, Lawrence's screams bounced between the walls of his head, his bedposts turned into rusty pipes, the scar in his shoulder was torn open. Couldn't even pretend that he wasn't back in the bathroom.

And Lawrence.

Lawrence was the one who locked Adam's arms behind his back when he threw things into walls, the one who grabbed his wrist and pulled him down onto the cold tiles, the one who whispered, with his strong, mumbling voice: Don't hate, Adam.

But now, Adam hates. He hates Jigsaw, hates him for what he's done to Adam and what he's done to Lawrence, hates him with a dull, cold, icy hatred.

And not even Lawrence's warm hands are here to stop that now.

"Well," he says, annoyed, sick of the silence that seems to press against his eardrums. "What else do you want to know?"

Jigsaw lifts his gaze and looks at him. The first sign he's given this far to show that Adam isn't just white noise to him.

"So that was yours and doctor Gordon's first kiss?"

"Don't call him that!" Adam hisses, remembers the stiletto that glistened, the flesh that split, and quickly regrets his words of choice. "Or yeah, it was."

"And your relationship has kept going since then?"

"Yeah. Fuck, you know this stuff!"

No reply. Like talking to a

(skull)

wall.

"Do you love him?"

And there it is.

The question that Adam's feared more than anything else. More than the stiletto, more than Jigsaw, more than what happened to Allison when she'd gotten down to the basement, outside the cameras' view.

The question. The question he can't answer, simply because if he answers it, he has to admit that Jigsaw actually is right, or as right as you can be with that philosophy, that there's a reason he's here again, a reason to why he has to see Lawrence in black and white, out of Adam's reach and out of his own control.

If he answers this, Jigsaw will go from being a bitter, vengeance-filled psychopath to someone with a purpose.

Someone who sees beyond people's masks, sees their soar spots, sees them tremble with fear and insecurity, raises his stiletto, stabs.

And Adam can't handle that.

So he doesn't answer. Doesn't even try.

"Do you love him?"

Adam's eyes travel down to the floor. And Jigsaw takes that as an absolute rejection, so he heaves himself back onto his feet, with a cringe that draws like a cloud over his blank face, and takes that fucking stiletto out again.

Once again, Adam doesn't look. Once again, he wants to seem indifferent, but he can't keep a low whimpering from rising in his throat when he once again first feels nothing, then nothing, then something warm that runs down his upper arm, just below that first wound where the blood has started to cake, and then, that pain engulfs him, burning and pricking and warm, and what worries Adam the most is that that's the only place on his body that's warm right now. He's not just cold from the hatred, that heat that pours out of him is his life, and it goes away, dissolves in the whirl that the room has turned into before his gaze.

"Are you ready to answer me now?" Jigsaw asks calmly, and leaves a red, thin triangle over Adam's t-shirt when he wipes his knife off on it.

"Fuck you," Adam hisses and blinks some stubborn tears away.

"Adam," Jigsaw says, with a new sternness now, like he's correcting a little child. "I don't like cutting you. But you are, despite your relationship with doctor Gordon, just as angry as before, and just as bad at handling it. So I cut you to make you tell me: Do you love doctor Gordon or don't you?"

Adam blinks. He blinks and he blinks and he tries to close his throat down all together, but nothing helps. The tears rise, drip down, and he doesn't have the energy to fight anymore, today's pain, loss, hatred, fear, such fucking big fear finally gets too much, and Adam cries, helplessly and reluctantly, and he does it in front of Jigsaw and he hates himself for that, but his hatred isn't as important anymore.

Lawrence is important. He, and nothing else, is important.

And Adam might never see him again.

And if now is the last time he sees Lawrence, now, when it's not even for real, but on a blurry screen, Lawrence will never know how much Adam loves him, he'll never know that Adam really is broken inside, but without Lawrence, the brokenness isn't even something he can endure, he'll never know that Adam would go through all of this, all the pain and all the suffering that he's been through today, over and over again, if only he can lay down in Lawrence's arms every night, if only he can feel those lips against his own again, if only he… Gets to feel loved.

Lawrence will never know that.

Because Adam didn't dare to tell him.

Adam didn't dare, because he was afraid of being let down. Just like all the other times he's loved someone. Dared to love someone.

Jigsaw still doesn't even flinch. Adam's dry sobs just seem to slip around on his harsh shell without getting through to him, but Adam still feels, in some way, that this is something he's waited for since he brought him here.

"Do you love him?"

Once more. The tone is a little softer, but Adam doesn't hear that.

He's too busy gathering up the pieces of his voice, swallow them, make them stick in his throat, form words with his cold lips.

The blood is pouring. And he doesn't want to get cut again.

"You know I do."

Quietly. Like a plea. And Jigsaw nods.

"Yes. I know that."

Pause. Adam's blood is starting to drop onto the floor, and he's cold. It shouldn't be physically possible to be this cold.

"Why haven't you told him?"

Adam swallows again. It burns, and he's cold. He's so cold, and everything's darker, everything's blurrier, even though there are only two wounds that gape like mouths on his left upper arm.

And he admits.

The pain from that, the pain from his definite defeat, can't possibly sting as much as the cuts, the sight of Lawrence on the TV-screen, the memories from his childhood that's stirred up inside of him from what he's about to say. So he admits.

"Because… I was afraid."

"Of what?"

"I was afraid that he'd leave me."

"Why?"

"Everyone leaves me."

The answers just run out of him as easily as the blood out of his arm, faster than his frozen brain manages to even register the questions. He teaches himself stuff in the same time as he teaches Jigsaw.

"Who's left you?"

"Mom."

True.

The tears are pouring.

"Did you love her?"

"Yes."

"When did she leave you?"

"When I was sixteen."

"Why did she leave you?"

"Because she had to."

Bounce, bounce, questions and answers jump back and forth between them in the speed of light. And the tears pour even more violently down Adam's face now, as he actually remembers.

Because he'd forgotten.

He'd actually forgotten that it wasn't his mom that left him, but he who left his mom.

He'd forgotten what happened that summer night thirteen years ago.

xxxxxxxxxxx

"Adam!"

She's running towards him, her black hair is flying behind her, the mascara's running, those eyes that everyone says Adam's inherited from her are clouded with fear.

Adam knows that she wants to save him. But the truth is that the eyes scare him as much as the thing that's chasing her, simply because he knows that when his mom looks like that, it really is bad.

Samantha Faulkner isn't supposed to be this way. She's not supposed to flee, she's not supposed to be scared, she's not supposed to grab Adam's arms so hard that her fingers leave marks.

Adam's mom has always been The Collected One. All those nights when her husband has drunken too much, she's the one who helps him into bed. All those times when he leaves his hands in red prints on her face, she's the one who, with no complains, puts makeup over the bruises before Adam wakes up.

Adam's mom is the one who, when people ask her, calmly and elegantly looks them in the eye and says that yes, her husband's an alcoholic. Yes, he's abusing her. Yes, she's afraid of him and yes, she should leave him, but she doesn't dare. She's going to get her son out of this if the situation gets unmanageable, because yes, he's all she's got, and yes, she loves him more than anything else on earth and she doesn't want to let him into the cold, harsh world she's so familiar with unless she has to.

So now, when his mom is as terrified as he is, Adam knows that the situation is unmanageable weather he likes it or not. He's always known that this moment would come, mom has talked about it those days when dad's collapsed on the couch, she's brought Adam to the front porch, taken his face between her warm hands and said that he's going to have to leave her at some point.

Now is that time. And Adam hates that.

"Adam! You have to run away!"

Adam doesn't know what he's supposed to answer. He opens his mouth and closes it again, sees his mother's terrified, flickering gaze and hears his father slam a door open inside.

"Sam!"

Mom glances over at the house. Then looks at Adam again, shakes him a little.

"Adam," she says, and now, her voice is all I'm-in-control-now-firm again, but for once, it doesn't make Adam one tiny bit calmer. "He's been drinking. A lot. More than usual. You have to run away from here, do you understand?"

Adam can't answer. His throat has been clogged up.

He can't even cry.

Can't even cry when he leaves the person he loves more than anything in this world.

"Run to Fred's," mom says and talks about Adam's best friend. "Stay there until I call you. I stay here and make sure that dad doesn't follow you. It's better that way."

And then, she wraps her slim arms around Adam's neck and hugs him, tightly, tightly, like never before, and Adam feels every rib in her body, feels her tears in his hair and suddenly knows that she's lying.

Suddenly knows what she knows, too. Unless his father drowns in his own vomit, or something, he'll never see his mom again.

"I love you."

He's never said that before. The words don't sound like his own, maybe because his throat is still filled with gravel.

"I love you, too," his mom says, and her voice shakes too much to be in control now. "Run! Now!"

And Adam runs, without wanting to and without looking back, look at the first and only woman he's ever loved, because he doesn't know what else to do, knows that he still wouldn't see her because the tears are running down, gushing, big and heavy and hot, gushes down because he knows that this image of his mother, red-eyed, with the mascara like black stripes that cross the bruises in her face, is the image that'll be etched onto the back of his eyelids for the rest of his life, because it's the last one he'll ever get.

Adam runs. He doesn't run to his friend, he just runs, until the sunrise paints a thin line over the horizon, and he passes out by the edge of the road.

Ah, Adam… I just can't give him a break! Don't worry, though, Lawrence will be tortured again soon! But only if you review…