FIC: Standing In The Doorway

[dollarformyname]

Story Title: Standing In the Doorway
Author: dollarformyname
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: PG13?
Warnings: Language. Angst.
Timeline/Spoilers: Set post Swan Song.
Disclaimer: Supernatural belongs to Eric Kripke and other people who aren't me.
Word Count: ~2,448
Summary: Aftermath after aftermath when the after was never supposed to come, and moving on is not a simple thing. Not even close.
A/N: There was a song on my playlist shuffle, and Adam randomly popped into my head demanding a part in some of that angst the boys do so well. So here we are. I'm not too sure about this, but the muse is an unruly thing. :/

 

-:-

“I'm not going out there
Don't try to tell me I'm paranoid
Wouldn't say I'm not scared
Though it may be safe to say that I am annoyed.”

Standing In The Doorway ~ Soul Asylum

-:-

His stomach flutters, icy sweat and asthmatic breaths, hands gripping the doorframe so hard and long they ache. It's nice out, a cloudless, cobalt day, salty air and the roaring slam of waves, sun a burning promise of warmth he can't bring himself to feel.

“This is fucked,” he puffs out raggedly, shuffling back, back, and back some more, fingertips digging into the wood to prevent his own escape. A splinter lodges beneath his fingernail, but he barely registers the sting. “My whole—“ Deeper inhale, steadier voice. “My whole life's fucked up. I'd be completely justified if I went emo.”

“Nothing would justify the hair,” comes the deep response from behind. Rustle of a newspaper, thoughtful little hum. “Not that your hair's any better now.”

Adam scoffs, creak of taut knuckles, and he takes a tiny step toward the threshold. He does this dance every day. It's always the day to do it, yet it never quite happens. “Goth, then. Or maybe punk.” A seagull makes a sudden dive for the water, soars sharply back into the wide open sky with a flopping, silvery prize in its beak. He winces in sympathy for the fish. “Which group wants everyone to fuck off and die again?”

“I think they just call 'em teenagers.”

“Oh. Well, yay for me. I still qualify.”

“Technically,” is the noncommittal reply.

Those years and years and decades and eons elsewhere don't count, mostly because that would require an admission of some kind, and he's not really okay with that. “I could join a gang,” he suggests, works his jaw and tries to death-stare the quake out of his limbs. “Spraypaint my grievances all over public property.”

A sigh, paper slapped down onto the wobbly kitchen table, an odd stutter of sound before the heavy tread of boots is heard; he's always forgetting the little symphonies of life, constantly reminding himself to make unimportant noises that are actually very important unless you're looking to scare the shit out of unsuspecting people. Except that he's not reminding himself, it's Adam reminding him... or something. It's all very confusing and probably best not to get into it.

The hand that falls on Adam's shoulder soaks up any warmth he might've collected in the muddled middleground of porch shade and sunlight.

“You'd hafta go outside for that work, son.”

“I'm working up to it.” He grits his teeth, fucking hates this. All of it, every second. “It's a process.”

It is a process. A long, arduous process complete with insanity and mind-numbing terror. It's easier in the daytime, when everything shines bright and clear—his night vision is kind of on the bad-acid-trip side of horrifying these days—and he can at least acknowledge the windows and doors and the views they provide, acknowledge that there is a place beyond these four walls, frightening as it all is. He can't venture out into it, but he lets it exist when there's light, and that's something.

The breeze picks up, smoke and cooked meat on the wind, a distant neighbor grilling something. The sticky thudding against his rib cage kicks up its tempo and he flinches away, white sand rolling across the floorboards and tickling the tops of his feet. He slams the door shut, throws himself against it and slides slowly to the floor, tries to get the buzzing in his head to die back down.

He really fucking hates this.

He glares up through the blurred lens of tears, tremulously swipes at his face until it clears up. Dark, pitying eyes look down on him, and he loathes them, disgusted with how it turns out he needs them. “Do you even know how much you suck?”

Bottomless guilt Adam's come to recognize so well in the hard lines etched around that mouth, and it isn't as satisfying as he thought it'd be all those months (years and years and years) ago, when he was just a slightly bitter kid with abandonment issues. “I can guess.”

“You couldn't have been in the mafia or something?” Adam sniffs and cuts his gaze over to the bare, wood-paneled walls, the dancing glow of reflected water coming in through the windows. “I could've handled that legacy a lot better.”

Old joints crackle and pop as he squats down to Adam's level. “I'm sorry, kiddo.” The voice is choked and gruff, sincere, but Adam jerks away from the rough hand intent on ruffling his hair or something equally condescending. It doesn't mean anything. None of it does.

“I'm not a kid anymore.” It's not defiance or pride, just sad facts. “You made sure of that. Kinda what you excel at, from what I hear.”

“Adam.” Oh, shit. He sounds like he's about to cry. Adam holds his breath, concentrates until that anguished croak goes away, but his head's not cooperating with much of anything lately. “There's nothing I could say that—“

“So don't say,” Adam snaps, shaking harder and hating, hating, hating it. “I don't wanna—“ He sighs, skims a hand over his eyes. “I know, okay? I know you feel like shit and I know I'm not the only one that got a raw deal and I don't wanna talk about this anymore. We both just end up feeling shittier when we do this and I don't even remember how to feel better, so I'm pretty sure I can't make you feel better.” He meets that dark, watery gaze again and this ache is too familiar, bone-deep and so, so exhausting. “Can we just. Can we be quiet now? I'm tired.”

A curt nod, and he rises, moves back to the kitchen table and snaps the paper open again.

A new edition appears on the front porch every morning, like someone thinks Adam actually wants to know what's going on in the world anymore. His world is so far in the past, so beyond shattered, it's too insulting to even consider anyone else having one only to be screwing it all up with reckless abandon. He'll save the depressing headlines for the revolving houseguests.

Sighing, Adam pushes himself up and goes to lay on the couch, thrown carelessly askew in a sparse, unordered living room. It's barely ten, the early morning hours spent trying and failing to move on in any way at all, night spent wide-eyed and twitchy, clinging to his questionable sanity in a gloom so deep it's paralyzing. When the sun is at its peak is when it's safest to close his eyes.

He slings an arm across his face and sinks down, lulled by the comforting scuffle of the imagined dead. Just one of the many consequences of surviving Hell—it makes previously naïve civilians a little crazy, puts ghosts in their heads. Some to stand guard while he rests, others to comfort while he slowly loses what's left of his mind.

It's better than being alone, though. He's not so good at that these days.

-:-

Once upon a long-ass time ago, Adam's mom used her accrued vacation time for an actual vacation, complete with travel and packing excitement and brand-new territory to be savored and explored. One of Kate's doctor friends granted them use of her summer home in California, and Adam was hopelessly enamored with the place at first sight.

It had everything: a huge maze of redwoods to get lost in behind the property, a stretch of private beach that went on forever, even a seaside cliff looming a few miles to the north just begging to be scaled and conquered. The house was huge and hung strangely off a hillside, walls of windows, nooks and crannies aplenty to fill a young adventurer's heart to bursting, and he occupied much of his time adding his wild imaginings to those of the neighboring kids he'd befriended during his two-week stay. They constructed some of the best sandcastles known to man, littered the forest with forts and carved initials and youthful bits of wisdom into the bark, spent a few nights camped out on the beach with their parents drinking around a bonfire, told ghostly pirate stories and splashed around in the surf in search of sunken treasure.

It was one of the best times of his life, and even though it ended, as all good things do, even though there was never really an opportunity to have another vacation like it, the memory stayed sharp and fresh.

Particularly fresh was his first night spent in a strange place. He'd never been so far from home, and his mother was fond of saying little boys had exceptionally rabid imaginations. When you're ten, monsters are just one of those elusive facts of life—unseen and unknowable, but still very real and possible things.

The windows rattled with the wind, ocean crashing around under a bloated moon that cast sinister shadows all over the walls, and when he crawled into his mom's bed and told her the depths were coughing up their unholiest creatures to come and eat him, she didn't tell him to suck it up and brave the dark like a good boy, or roll her tired eyes, or even smirk in condescending fondness. Just pulled him into the safety of her blankets and told him all about the magical barriers of saltwater and giant trees, that monsters couldn't swim and the forest was a benevolent presence keeping watch over them.

And he knew he was protected there. His mom's tale effectively woven and the warm circle of her arms holding him close, there was no better sanctuary in the world, not even his own home.

Playgrounds and laughter and happier times are for when you're a little down, a little out, or temporarily dead and in semi-paradise. When you're at your lowest, more lost and used and broken than most souls in existence, you'll settle for the smallest reprieve, a little security. Any at all.

So it stands to reason that when a deep voice came out of nowhere in the middle of his bloody, endless torment, a whispered, “Anything you want,” full of sorrow and promise, that house, tucked away and unreachable amidst its natural defenses, was the immediate mental image that accompanied his answering sob.

“Safe. I just wanna go somewhere safe. Please.”

The house isn't quite the same now as it was then, ravaged by time and neglect. There's a rusting FOR SALE sign planted at the end of the long drive, just visible around the bend of trees from the front porch, exterior filmed with salt and sea grime. No one ever comes here to challenge its new, bleak-eyed squatter. The inside is sparsely furnished and always magically stocked with food and supplies, no pictures or knick-knacks or personal touches aside from the convenient blackout curtains he can pull shut against the dark.

It's just this side of livable and it's all he needs, the least He could for him, if He was indeed the benefactor. Adam doubts that sometimes, considering His track record, but thinking too hard about it never leads anything pleasant.

-:-

Every light in the house is on and there's a storm. The outside world refuses to be ignored tonight, battering and flashing, skies and seas colliding. Adam's eyes bulge up at the juddering ceiling, flat on his back, fingers white and gouging at the sofa. He can't so much as blink, and his heart's intent on recreating that scene from Alien, set to punch through bone and skin in a gory bid for freedom.

“It's okay, sweetie. It'll pass. This place was built to withstand this kinda thing, you'll see.” He barely hears her over the crack of lightning, her attempt to hum a comforting tune drowned out by vicious, scrabbling memories.

Adam's not even really here right now. He's gone back, gone under, trapped inside his own head again, a thwarted archangel at the helm with a rage to rival the most devastating furies mother nature could conjure.

Everything got tossed and shredded in there, and he got so lost trying to not feel and not see and not hear the things ravaging him. They reached him anyway, but it was nothing compared to being thrust back into the driver's seat mid-damnation. Michael fled his human hindrance and took his unfettered A-game to the weakest points of the cage, left Adam to bleed and scream at Lucifer's hand, wishing for nothing more than to crawl back inside his own poorly-constructed walls and never have to come out again.

He's done that now, only it's a little too after the fact and not working out quite as well with literal walls. Maybe the demons aren't as visible, this world not as agony-riddled and bloodthirsty, but the veil has been lifted all the same, no turning back from the knowledge. There are monsters in forms he can't even comprehend, and he's dead certain—emphasis on the dead—if he sets foot outside that door they'll hone in on his cursed blood in seconds flat. (It's not like the theory hasn't been proven a few times already.)

That's if the walls don't all just come crashing down and let them right in.

“Mom. Momma, please,” he rasps, shaking so hard, always fucking shaking.

She's at his side in an instant, recliner abandoned in favor of perching on the edge of the couch, soft hands in his hair. “What do you need, baby? Tell me what to do.” She sounds so sad. He doesn't want that, doesn't know how to change it.

“Please.” Moisture gathering in his eyes, night clamoring too loudly, and it's all he can get out.

Make it stop, he wants to say. Fix it. Fix me. But she can't do that, no one can do that, and she'll just get sadder if he sets impossible standards.

“John,” she whispers, gathering his stiff form into a desperately constricting hug, then louder, “John!”

Adam lets her shush and pet him, and suddenly the smell of old grease and leather is there too, thicker arms closing around them from behind and a deep rumble in his ear: “It's okay, kiddo. We're not goin' anywhere. You're okay now.”

Truths and lies, all jumbled up, but the embrace is all he can focus on, the absence of warmth and the very real sensation of his mother's shirt in his fists, his dad's stubble-rough cheek against his nape.

Adam's not safe here at all. Never was. He always knew that, but letting go of the illusion is so. goddamn. hard.

-:-

A/N: There may or may not be a second part. I've started it but am hesitant to go forward, so I'm asking for opinions. Is this an adequate (albeit somewhat tragic) ending, or shall I... well, not exactly fix him, but put him on the road to mending? Or would that be too much? Any and all feedback is much appreciated!

ETA: I suck. Season 6 is kinda killing any ideas I had for a second half, so letting it stand as a completed fic is probably for the best. :( Sorry to anyone who still cares.

Comments

[morkhan.livejournal.com]

OH MY GOD.

*grabs Adam*

*hugs forever*

Oh, it just hurts so much. Such a strange and painful situation he has found itself in, his shattered, ruined mind unable to even let himself greet daylight, his father and mother there with him, yet he cannot take any comfort from them and, truth be told, he (and by extension us) cannot even tell if any of it is real, if he is in heaven, hell, or some kind of purgatory, or maybe even back on earth with his busted brain conjuring up his parents because he is just that desperate for someone to love and take care of him, and, and, and... ow. ;-;

*squeeze*

Everything comes with a price. Averting the apocalypse was never going to be easy, but we always assumed it would be Sam and Dean who paid for it. No one ever imagined that poor, dead Adam would be brought back just to bear the weight of their punishment. The world goes on as it always has, Sam and Dean get back together and hunt for monsters, and Adam quivers in a miserable half-life, his soul so ruined that not even Heaven can fix him.

...yeah, I quite liked this. >_> Hey, it's Supernatural. We're nothing if not a fandom of horrible, horrible sadists.

[dollarformyname.livejournal.com]

I know! He needs SO MANY hugs. I blame this whole thing on sleep deprivation. I was all 'Self? WHY are you doing this to the poor bastard?' while I was writing, and IDEK. I think I need to write lots of schmoop for him soon, just to even the scales.

So I guess that's one vote in favor of leaving it as is. Duly noted. Thank you!

(We are ridiculously sadistic, trufax.)

[morkhan.livejournal.com]

Oh, no no no! This is not a 'leave it as it is' vote. It was just appreciating the story you've already written. We break the boys so we can put them back together again. Or have them put each other back together through the healing power of sex.

Really, I just want you to write more. I think I'll be happy whether you make him better or (somehow) even worse than before. @_@

[tharrow.livejournal.com]

I love this so much! It's so sad but-

I think I would like to see a slow beginning to mend Part 2, maybe with Dean and Sam? I don't know, I think this is great either way.

[dollarformyname.livejournal.com]

Thank you! It's completely depressing, IDEK where it came from. I was perfectly happy with life when I started, so. *shrugs*

Thanks for your input on the second part. We'll see what we see, I guess. :)

[angel-gospel.livejournal.com]

If you don't continue, I'll be very, very upset! Like, seriously, because I am enjoying this. The disconnected way you string together your words fits this theme of illusion so perfectly! But I can still visualize Adam's surroundings, his emotions, etc., as much as is considered for this fic. I want to say bring on the fluff, but you don't need any advice to be awesome, apparently, so go with the flow -- write whatever the muses tell you to, bet it angst or schmoop; just write and don't stop!

[dollarformyname.livejournal.com]

Ah, we wouldn't want that! I guess part two is in order, then (oh, how hard it is to influence me ;).

Thank you so much! I'm really glad the illusory aspect of it came off in a way that lends to his state of mind but didn't befuddle the crap out of the reader in the process. Yay! I will try to finish it soon-ish (too much shiny, not enough attention span). :D

[dulcedeusex.livejournal.com]

Keywords that sprang to my mind as a I read this:

"discombobulation"

"disorientation"

"evisceration"

"soul-sucking"

This was so frigging intense. I felt like I was viewing everything through Adam's eyes. I was equally disconnected and afraid.

He winces in sympathy for the fish. “Which group wants everyone to fuck off and die again?”
“I think they just call 'em teenagers.”
“Oh. Well, yay for me. I still qualify.”
“Technically,” is the noncommittal reply.
Those years and years and decades and eons elsewhere don't count, mostly because that would require an admission of some kind, and he's not really okay with that.

-- I winced in sympathy for him!

He can't so much as blink, and his heart's intent on recreating that scene from Alien, set to punch through bone and skin in a gory bid for freedom.

-- I loved this line right here.

-- The imagery of the stormy sky, the sea... was fantastic.

-- I didn't care much for this dude until his return/resurrection in SPN then I thought, "OMG poor guy." I also thought he had that credible attitude of "you're not my family".

There are monsters in forms he can't even comprehend, and he's dead certain—emphasis on the dead—if he sets foot outside that door they'll hone in on his cursed blood in seconds flat.

-- It's weird how before I read this I never thought about what it would mean for Adam. He really got a shitty break.

Adam's not safe here at all. Never was. He always knew that, but letting go of the illusion is so. goddamn. hard.

-- DUUUUDE! This is such an amazing closing line. One last right hook before the story's over. Nicely done.

-- Overall thoughts? I think it's great as a standalone. Maybe you can write another standalone of after he's let go and encounters his bros. There's a reckoning needed there methinks, and I don't know if SG is gonna give me what I need! ; - )

[dollarformyname.livejournal.com]

Oh, how I love your reviews! Let me count the ways.

I'm ecstatic his state of mind came across okay. I was nervous about it because I don't generally handle angst all that well; throw in the confusion that is just broken!Adam in this, and I completely expected to bomb. But it needed to see the light of my computer screen. I had no choice in the matter, really.

I adore how you pick up the details of what I'm trying to convey; I'm always worried I'm being too subtle, but then I don't want to get too heavy-handed, either. *twirls you*

[dulcedeusex.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the twirlage! I'm adding this to my mems by the by. : )

[dollarformyname.livejournal.com]

Thanks very much! Glad you enjoyed.

[jebbypal]

Great job - a character we see maybe 3 eps of and you have me crying over him. :( Absolutely brilliant

[dollarformyname.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry I made you tear up, except where I'm kinda not. ;) It's a lovely compliment, thank you!

[tyranusfan.livejournal.com]

I liked this. You did a great job conveying Adam's broken state, and the imagery was really good.

I probably need to reread this (and I will)...but was all this in Adam's head? John and his mom? At first, I thought he was with Sam. Then Dean. Then I thought "Bobby?" Only to be surprised to think it was John. Then, when I got the end, I thought he was just holed up in the old house, drowning in his delusions.

Anyway, great job!