InsaneJournal

WHO: Adam Milligan and OPEN
WHAT: Fresh out of Hell, Adam isn't sure how to handle being topside again.
WHEN: Just before this.
WHERE: An abandoned house a few blocks from the communal housing building.
RATING: TBD [possibly a bit high]
STATUS: In Progress

Pain. For as long as he could remember, pain was all Adam had known. No. Pain wasn't the right word. Agony, maybe. Or something even stronger than that, whatever that might be. Words were failing him at the moment. Everything was failing him at the moment. His senses told him that the cot he'd woken on was real, that there wasn't any fire consuming him, that the pain he'd known for so long was finally, finally gone. Yet experience told him that it wouldn't last. That sooner or later, Lucifer would grow tired of the illusion, or Michael would put a stop to it, and the agony would return, even stronger than before as the two Archangels once again began to fight while putting Adam squarely in the middle.

It hadn't always been that way, he was pretty sure. Once upon a time, Sam had been there too. Sam had protected him as best he could, done everything in his power to keep him shielded from the grudge match between the higher beings. Then Sam had gone away, and Adam had been left alone. Alone to deal with everything while having no power to stop any of it. Alone to come to terms with the fact that this was his existence, now. He was nothing more than a means to an end. A way for Lucifer to strike out at Michael, and a way for Michael to show his displeasure at Adam not being good enough... at him not being Dean.

And then it was gone. All of it. Replaced by a cot, a room with a few people milling about, and a building. And while Adam knew that none of it could be real, because nothing this nice would ever be real, not ever again, he was still loathe to see it end. Because it was those moments, those rare instances when the torture stopped and the mind games began, that he was able to sometimes - just sometimes - seize ahold of his sanity and try to figure out a way to survive another round of it yet again.

This time, though, things were decidedly different. When he made a run for the door, no one stopped him. The illusion didn't dissolve. In fact, he was greeted with the sharp sounds and harsh lights of a world he'd forgotten even existed. Stumbling backward a bit, he blinked a few times before forcing his legs to continue carrying him. Whatever Lucifer was playing at, whatever was keeping Michael from stepping in, Adam didn't care. He just knew that this was a chance to at least try to find a way out and he wasn't about to waste it.

Unfortunately, he didn't make it very far before exhaustion and terror caused him to divert from the sidewalk, into the first place he came across where no one seemed to be. The windows in the house were boarded up, the front door was hanging on by nothing more than a single hinge. There was dust and dirt covering everything in sight and the air was chilly due to a significant lack of heat. Adam, however, didn't care. Hands trembling, he searched through a pile of debris near the front door of the abandoned house until he found something sharp enough to cut himself with. Then, relying on the knowledge he still possessed from his time spent as Michael's vessel, he began to scrawl out every single sigil he could think of to keep angels out. The last thing he drew - the one that always, always made the illusion fade and the torture start again - was the banishing sigil. Adam's hands trembled even more violently as he painstakingly drew it on the farthest wall from the front door. He held his breath as he finished, fully expecting the wall to fade into nothingness.

Only this time, it didn't. And when he finished, and the house was still in one piece, Adam felt a sob of relief combined with confused terror burst from his lips. Clamping his other hand over his mouth to silence himself, he finally turned toward the front door, pressed his back to the wall beside the banishing sigil, and slowly slid to the floor. It wasn't until he was on the ground that he felt the weight of something in his pocket and, upon closer inspection, discovered it was some sort of communication device. Curiosity won out after a few minutes and he turned it on, blood-stained fingers slipping over the tiny keys as he typed out a message and waited to see what was going to happen next. He didn't know what the game was, and certainly didn't know the rules, but so far it was different and, as twisted as he knew it might sound, for that much he was grateful.