entrancelogs | OPEN | there's a place i have gone

Entry tags:

OPEN | there's a place i have gone

Who: Adam Milligan (

halfwinchester) and anyone who cares to cross his path!
Where: Around the mansion.
When: Oct. 17th.
Rating: PG-13?
Summary: Having been unconscious for most of his stay in Wonderland, when Adam has a lucid moment he takes himself on a tour of the mansion.
The Story:

For someone who'd been in Wonderland for over a week, Adam had seen remarkably little of it since Castiel had brought him indoors. The forest, he remembered in flashes and vague splinters of memory, and that was only in those rare moments of consciousness.

Being awake meant remembering everything. Each time he breathed, he smelled burning skin in Hell's fires. Each time he moved, he felt phantom pain from Hell's ministrations. Each time he closed his eyes, Hell. No matter what the angels had done to him, Hell was still everywhere, and he was still a part of it. Unconsciousness was a blessing in disguise when Hell was all you had to wake up to, and if he’d had a choice, he would have picked oblivion every single time.

But on the ninth day, something changed.

Adam woke up to a sense of clarity he hadn't felt between his pelting through the trees on his first day and the angels playing with his soul like Silly Putty. Not since… no, he couldn't remember. Not since before. Not since he’d had a body and a place in the real, physical world without Michael. As he stared at the ceiling, the fact that the room stayed just a room and didn’t bleed into a place he’d been in his memories, or somewhere in the pit, almost confused him more than the alternative.

For once, lying in a bed (in Wonderland of all places, according to an angel, whatever that counted for) seemed like a possibility and not just a fever dream cobbled together by a sick mind.

Real.

What that possible? Really? He hadn’t believed Castiel about being free, not enough to dare let that hope sink in. Now, the longer he laid there, the more doubt crept in.

Free…?

If he was alive, being alive felt an awful like being on the verge of passing out. Sliding out of bed and convincing his legs to hold him up was a touch-and-go affair, made worse by a floor that didn’t seem to want to stay steady underneath him. Getting across the room was a sheer miracle in and of itself; his need to know just what the fuck was happening to him just barely outweighed his body's desire to pitch him over. He held onto the door frame to rest for a second. Good for him that he didn't have any dignity left to lose.

"Warmed-over shit" was a good way to describe the young man who eventually staggered into the sixth floor hallway that morning, unshaven and unwashed. A kind assessment, given that Hell was still written all over the lines of his face; it was in the glassy cast to his eyes and the purpled skin underneath, in the way he had to steady himself on the occasional section of wall. Absorbed in the push and pull of his own muscles, Adam almost forgot his surroundings entirely. Stairs, more hallways, rooms… Places he didn’t recognize, falling forgotten behind him.

The first time he glimpsed himself in a mirror brought him to a halt, however. Startled, he froze in place before turning back to the mirror, bringing his hands to rest on either side of it.

He saw his face. At the same time, he saw the face of a stranger. The person in it didn't look… right.

Maybe he was alive, after all. Only reality could be this gaunt, and cold, and uncomfortable.

_{(OOC: It's prose to start, but I'm down with action tags! Feel free to find him anywhere in the mansion you'd like, too.)}

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"I'm sure."

Her voice was as quiet as it was firm, resolved. She may not have had all the answers when it came to Wonderland, but there were a few things she knew for certain. It may not have always been pleasant, but Wonderland was not Hell.

"When I got here, I wasn't convinced, either. I didn't know if it was Heaven or Hell, but-- it's been awhile now. It took time, but this isn't any kind of afterlife. Not everyone here is dead, and I don't think anyone is here expressly to be punished. It's not paradise, either, it's just-- it's like home, that way. Some good. Some bad. No absolutes."

He hadn't meant for her to answer the question (who could tell him what was wrong inside his own head?), but she sure sounded confident about it, and in turn that made Adam agitated for no good reason besides the fact that everything about Heaven and home had already gone up in smoke for him.

Was he supposed to be happy? Was he supposed to cry? Was he supposed to be afraid? What then, if not what he'd been doing for the past dismal stretch of time? What?

"Well, I'm not," he said. "Down there is a pretty big absolute."

How could she claim he was free so easily when not even the angels had--

The angels. That was right. Their presence was something he was sure about, and everything tied back to them somehow. Adam looked at her with a new wariness. "It has something to do with them, doesn't it? Angels."

"I don't think so. I did, at first. It made sense, considering how powerful they are." Not to mention their tendency to grab hold of people and do whatever they damn well pleased without permission. Except for taking someone as a vessel, of course. That, they needed permission for. And wasn't that what every awful thing in the last few months before she'd come here had boiled down to?

"But there are a few here. Castiel, Gabriel. They're stuck like everyone else. I don't think they'd cage themselves, and even if it were other angels who were responsible, I don't think they'd be powerful enough to keep their own kind held like this."

She paused, worrying at her lower lip as she tilted her head to one side, curious. "You know about angels? I mean-- beyond just believing that they exist."

She had to know what angels were--what they were really like, more to the point--to be able to say that. She had to believe in them. Right? A normal, unaffected person wouldn't be able to straight-up answer a question like that and know their names without knowing what they were. Castiel was a name that particularly resonated with Adam, as well. Castiel wasn't just a figment of his imagination.

Adam pressed his lips tight together, taking what she said and thinking it over in slow, ponderous circles. Castiel... Gabriel. Angels stuck in a place they couldn't escape from? The latter half of the thought didn't add up, at least not to him, not after waking up from the Cage.

Judging him on his knowledge of angels was ironic, given that he'd spent the greater part of his existence in the presence of two. He peeled his gaze away from the far wall to meet her eyes, unafraid of the truth. The truth had already done all it could to hurt him.

"I should. They brought me back to help end the world and then sent me to Hell," he said. "If they didn't bring me back again, then why am I here?"

He kept asking the question, expecting a different answer. The definition of insanity.

She didn't seem to be as surprised by that particular truth as one might have expected her to be. For a moment, she looked mildly taken aback, but it passed. If he had been brought back by the angels, he wouldn't have been the first person she knew that had happened to. Little did she know, it was something of a Winchester family tradition. She, too, had been brought back, or perhaps simply rerouted between her death and going to heaven, but she was pretty sure that had been without angelic intervention.

"Sounds like you have a lot in common with some friends of mine," she told him, not unsympathetically. What else could be said? She knew firsthand just how much having the natural order disturbed could screw with you, mess with your head. Knowing she was dead and that everyone had moved on without her, that she wasn't supposed to be here had done a number on her head already, and that was without the involvement of Hell.

Christ.

"I don't know why you're here. I don't know why I'm here, either, but I'm kind of okay with getting a second chance. Looks like you're getting one, too."

"Why, did they get caught up in the Apocalypse, too?" He snorted.

Had they also done hard time in the pit because they'd been lied to with empty promises? Some friends, if so. If there were other gullible souls out there like him, hard to imagine they were in any better state. Maybe she was trying to tell him that this was the part of Hell where people who'd made shitty mistakes got to relive their greatest hits with an audience. Like Heaven, only without the good parts.

Adam didn't look particularly overjoyed to have someone suggest he was looking down the barrel of a second chance. A third chance, technically.

I'm not. He couldn't say it. Too much effort to point out to a strange figure in a strange place that he was done with chances.

"More common than you might think." Apparently, anyway. She wouldn't have thought so, but here there were, and she was trying her hardest not to be reactive, not to come off as stunned or shocked or anything that might rub him the wrong way or set him off. He seemed like it wouldn't take much to do so in his current state. She would stay calm. Careful.

"I won't ask you what happened. Can't imagine it's something you want to talk about at all, least of all with a stranger, but- whatever did happen, there are people here you can talk to. They'll get it."

Adam expression didn't change at all, stuck in a kind of flat, indecipherable stare. Some strange woman talking to him about life, death, and the Apocalypse didn't mean anything, it didn't mean anything. Believing otherwise meant believing that the Cage was in the past and that what she was saying was a real, concrete possibility.

He tilted his head just a touch, a questioning gesture at the same time that her assurances tapped into a deep vein of cynicism.

"Who?" he demanded? "The angels? The ones who started all of this?"

Who else could possibly understand what he'd gone through? Who could explain to him what was happening and why his soul felt like it was trying to devour itself like a snake eating its tail? If anyone had all the answers, Adam had yet to meet them.

She shook her head. No, not the angels. Even if he were comfortable talking to them, the angels weren't always the best people to go to if you were looking for perspective. Gabriel seemed to be the most human of them, and for him she might make an exception, but she also wouldn't wish him on a stranger. Some days were better than others, with him.

"No. Just friends. Their names are Sam and Dean. They--"

She couldn't come right out and say it, couldn't just blurt out that they had both been to Hell in their own time, been through death and found themselves pulled back out the other side, almost like she had -- except they got second chances. Second, and third, and fourth. She was just caught in limbo.

"They've been through a lot, too." More than she ever thought possible. A lot had happened in her absence. "They'll understand."

Edited 2013-12-05 17:02 (UTC)

No. No fucking way. His eyes narrowed.

"Sam and Dean?" he repeated, and there was no mistaking the flash in his eyes for anything else: he knew those names, and with them came a violent, red-flood of emotion. He'd never forget those names. His voice rose with twice the heat and volume. "Sam and Dean Winchester?"

He wasn't sure what he felt. Anger? Surprise? Resignation? Adam wanted to demand how she knew those names. Castiel had been one thing, but this person, too? Why did everything keep coming back to them? It wasn't the first time he'd had to face his brothers in the Cage, who they were, what they'd done, but this was different.

This felt... worse. Sharper and more bitter.

Coming from a stranger, even a phantom born of his own imagination, his brothers' understanding was a terrible joke being thrown back in his face.

"You've heard of them." It could have easily been a playful quip, but it wasn't -- instead, she sounded uncertain, worried that she'd said the wrong thing entirely and wondering if she'd somehow just managed to set off some horrible chain reaction without even trying. The mere mention of their names seemed to spark something in him. Should she really have been all that surprised? They had a lot of enemies, sure, but--

It made her wonder exactly who he was.

"How do you know them?"

Heard of them?

Adam pressed his lips tight together to hold back the snarl that wanted to escape him first--an instinctive response that came from the gut. Had he heard of them? Considering that they were in part responsible for every single nail Michael had hammered into his coffin, yeah, he supposed he knew a little about them. Just a little.

"I think I do, they're my brothers." The admission didn't hurt as much as it would if it'd been true in the normal sense of the word, if they'd been real brothers, but he still growled the word out, a bitter thing in his mouth. "How do you know them?"

Who is she, to bring them up? What is she?

"Your brothers."

She echoed him, and for a moment it seemed like she was just as off-balance as he was. Just as lost, just as uninformed. She shook her head slightly as if to clear it, but it didn't do much -- an old habit that was hard to break. Sam and Dean hadn't mentioned another brother, but--

"We're friends." She paused, unsure if she should use the word 'family' here and now. "We worked together back home. I wound up retiring early."

If you wanted to call it 'retiring.'

When a person was trying to do nothing more than retreat within their own mind and protect themselves, Adam had learned you could see all sorts of things under the strain of constant attack--like hallucinations, like living dreams. Minds were funny that way. He'd lived through plenty of his old life on repeat, and her surprise felt thoroughly familiar to him, though she herself was a stranger.

He'd been the secret son, yeah, he knew. No one had known about him until it'd been too late, and even then, he hadn't been part of Sam and Dean's family so much as a rope to tie Dean's hands behind his back. And now she was saying he would have to... what, have to face them again?

Being caught in a memory loop in Hell didn't mean the prospect became any more palatable with time.

"This really isn't doing much to make this place different than down there," he said. This was bullshit. Sam and Dean were a part of the pit.

"It is different."

She sounded certain on that, confident. It was something she'd given a lot of thought to: was this place better than some afterlife, or just another way to dress up heaven or hell? Given the things that happened here, Hell seemed more likely, but even then it wasn't enough. Not extreme enough. Too much of what could be found here was good. Not everything here could be qualified as punishment.

"It's not perfect, but good things can happen for yourself. It's another chance-- however many you've had before," she quickly added, before he could remind her that he'd already had his second. "However your story ended, you can rewrite some of it here. You're not limited to what or who you used to know. People here are lonely because they're far from home, but it means they lean on each other. Those friendships are worth something."

If this stranger, this friend of Sam and Dean's, wanted to prove this wasn't another of the Cage's tricks beyond a shadow of a doubt, then she would have to do better than empty promises. Zachariah... Zachariah had said the same sorts of things once upon a time.

And now look. Everything was in flames.

He didn't say anything, expression turning in on itself, a flicker of something like distaste at the prospect of better things to come in the way he frowned. Nothing of this added up. The only worth Adam saw in this conversation was that it was different than the torture he was used to. What did it mean? What was any of this supposed to mean?

Poised on the step, he waited to see what would come next.

"I know you're not buying any of this."

She didn't have to be a rocket scientist to figure that out. The tension sang through him, like he was ready to turn and run at any moment, but something about their conversation -- if it could be called that -- had held him here. He still stood there, waiting, expectant. He wasn't quite ready to rabbit off and hide just yet.

"I don't know how I can help. But I'd like to."

"Do you?" he wondered. "Because I don't know if you can really guess what I'm feeling right about now."

Mostly that the mindless, feral state he'd been in the day Castiel had found him had been bliss compared to what he was feeling now. He could throw himself down the stairs, and feel the pain of bruised bones, and it would still be nothing in comparison. Real or not, the Cage or not, Sam and Dean being there or not...

God, like he knew where to even start. Forget her helping him, he couldn't find a place to begin helping himself.

"Where are they?" The words left his mouth before he knew what he was saying. "Why aren't they here instead?"

"I can't know exactly what you're feeling. I know that. But I can guess. And I can read the look on your face."

The one that said he didn't trust her one bit, that he didn't trust anything that was going on around them. It made her curious about just how well he would be able to adapt to Wonderland in the long run. Her guess? Not very.

"I don't know where they are." It probably wasn't the answer he wanted to hear, but it was honest. "But I can tell them-- I can tell them you're up and around, if you wanted. ... do you want to see them?" she asked cautiously, uncertain. She wasn't so sure that he did.

The look on his face? Yeah, maybe. Maybe however he looked to her said everything he couldn't--everything he couldn't even begin to find words for. Maybe she saw just a little slice of Hell and how wrong this all seemed after so long there. Maybe he did want to see Sam and Dean, if just to prove their ghosts couldn't affect him anymore.

Mostly, though, Jo was right. He didn't really care to see their faces. Resentment was like an out of control fire in his chest, burning with the same ferocity as the Cage. And... and yet he prayed for the strength to take these figments of his imagination head on and not care. To prove he was above all of... this.

"I want this to stop." He lifted his eyebrows.

"I can't make it stop."

Because whatever he was seeing, whatever he was feeling, bringing an end to it was well out of her hands. If he was convinced that she wasn't real, that this place was some kind of an illusion, maybe there was nothing she'd be able to do to help him. Maybe all she could do was let him wait it out on his own.

"I'd like to help. I don't know how I can. But if you just-- if you need someone to talk to. I can do that much."

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OPEN | there's a place i have gone

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Sort of back from hiatus, apologies! <3

NO WORRIES.

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