Work Text:
The vessel began to burn almost immediately, the fires of the pit rising to meet them before they ever reached the cage below. Hell was made for suffering, but not for corporeal bodies. The skin seared and bubbled; blood boiled, and veins burst. For Michael, once they left Earth, it was nothing to slip out of the ruined flesh, unfolding his true form from its confines.
Before he could fully exit, something caught around the end of one wing: a tendril of energy, clinging like a vine to a tree branch straining toward the sun or perhaps like the tentacle of some sea beast binding around its next meal. Adam Milligan’s soul, writhing in the torment of his body, latched onto him. Wordless. Pleading.
Across the cage, Lucifer was already outside his spoiled vessel and set himself to punishing Sam Winchester for his betrayal. He tore the smoldering flesh off in strips while the human beneath his talons begged for mercy.
Michael lifted Adam Milligan’s soul from his body, the vessel the human had invited him into, however reluctantly, and in the pitch dark of the cage, it shone so brilliantly that it drew Lucifer’s attention from the agony of Sam Winchester.
He had just enough time to tuck the soul inside himself, no attention to where, before Lucifer was upon him. The collision rang through the cage like thunder, like the quaking of earth. As they fought, Michael only registered that Adam Milligan had found a space for himself, a cavity.
The battle raged for years. Michael knew not how many. They did not tire. They did not relent.
Then, without warning, blinding light pierced through the swirling smoke that surrounded the cage. An angel. Castiel, the angel Michael smote on the battlefield before he was cast down. And how could he yet live? There was too much power around him for his status, too. His wings snapped, and Michael and Lucifer were thrown apart, each pinned to the bars of the cage.
From his trapped position, Michael watched Castiel wrap a limb around the wretched remains of Sam Winchester’s body. He lifted it quickly, and as he did so, the force holding Michael back began to weaken. He was not so strong as he first appeared. As Sam Winchester’s body rose from the cage, the dim, frayed lump of his soul fell through a hole in his abdomen.
Castiel and the body left.
Though the force holding them disappeared then, Lucifer did not charge him, and Michael did not move to pursue. Lucifer turned to the naked soul writhing on the floor.
In short order, Sam Winchester’s screams began anew.
To that sound, now years after entering the cage, Michael finally realized where Adam Milligan’s soul had burrowed in: it was the place where he received revelation, where the Heavenly Host had once been. He could not hear them anymore. His brothers and sisters, silent. All he had in their place was the warm glow of a single human soul, Adam.
Michael observed it. Adam was still and silent, a timid animal with nowhere to run. Despite his fear, the soul was intact, no fraying edges like the unfortunate Sam Winchester.
You were not damaged in the battle, Michael observed.
The soul flinched. Adam, deep within him, replied, No.
That means Lucifer cannot harm you in that place.
The soul unfurled by degrees. Adam wondered, Can I stay here?
As his soul expanded, Michael realized how small it had seemed in that gaping chasm for revelation. A human soul could never hope to fill such a space entirely, but the more Adam spread out, the more space he filled. The emptiness abated. He replied, You will stay there. Then, as the din of Sam Winchester’s torture filled the cage, he added, And you will pray to me.
Dear Michael, Adam prayed. Faltered. Or should I say ‘O Michael’ or something like that? God, I haven’t prayed since I was a kid. My mom was Methodist, but we stopped going to church when I was little. Anyway, Methodists don’t really pray to angels. Do you have a preference?
Lucifer’s form rose up high and crashed down upon the shield of Michael’s wings.
I guess you’re probably busy. I’ll figure it out.
Dear Michael, thank you for protecting me from Lucifer. Thank you for letting me stay inside you where it’s safe. I pray that you stay strong while you fight him. I pray that this prayer is okay.
Michael thought Adam’s soul gave him an edge over Lucifer. A soul by itself was not significantly powerful in comparison to the might of an archangel, but to have one inside his own form reciting constant, clumsy litanies, perhaps that was enough. Lucifer retreated more often, returned to torture Sam Winchester instead.
Dear Michael, Adam prayed, though he did not normally pray when he and Lucifer weren’t doing battle.
Across the cage, Sam Winchester’s soul cried out in a torment visible only to himself. Fissures ran down its length.
I don’t know my brother Sam very well. I barely met the guy. But he’s my brother. Please protect him.
Michael’s attention turned inward. The soul curled smaller, protecting itself. The human had not yet prayed for anything Michael wasn’t already doing. He prodded at the soul, uncurling it as best he could until it filled him more to his satisfaction. Do you know what your brother did to become Lucifer’s vessel? he said. He drank the blood of humans possessed by demons.
Zachariah told me about that, Adam agreed. Then he dove headlong into a recitation, quickly uttered and repeated over and over: Dear Michael, thank you for protecting me. Please protect my brother. Dear Michael, thank you for protecting me. Please protect my brother.
Lucifer is my brother, Michael reminded him, but the prayers did not cease. Would you have me attack my own brother to save yours from the fate he brought on himself?
Dear Michael, thank you for protecting me. Please protect my brother. Please.
The defiance of his prayer rankled. He had thought perhaps the creature was becoming pious, in his own way. I could give him your soul instead, he said.
The prayers went silent. The soul trembled and began to curl up again.
Michael reached inside and prevented it, held Adam open so he could not hide.
Adam thought, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Please don’t cast me out.
Across the cage, Lucifer laughed at whatever unseen evils he unleashed on his plaything. He had made such pleas, long ago, to their father. God cast him down anyway.
Michael. Michael. Please. Keep me with you. Keep me safe. I won’t ask again. Please. His prayers of desperation came so fast and so fervent that they filled the chasm within Michael until he could hardly feel the emptiness at all, until the whole space where God and the Heavenly Host were meant to be were filled with Adam, Adam’s need, Adam’s fear and devotion.
Michael did not cast him out.
No angel came the next time, no blinding flash of light. One moment, Sam Winchester’s soul was clutched between Lucifer’s talons. The next, it was gone.
Michael knew of only four beings in all of existence that could perform such a feat. One God and the archangels locked away forever. Another would not leave its realm. That left God or Death.
A voice from that empty space inside him said, No one is coming to set me free, are they? but Michael could not be sure the voice was Adam’s, nor did he know the source of the heartbreak that followed.
For the first time in the decades they wallowed in the pit, Adam rose from his place of revelation, climbing somewhere closer to the surface, so near that Michael could see his glow. He feared, briefly, that Adam would try to leave. Instead, he found a place that was firm instead of empty, and he pressed his soul into it. The chasm he left behind yawned wide and empty and aching, but the shell around it became suffuse with warmth until he could not feel where his grace ended and Adam’s soul began.
Movement caught his attention. When Michael looked up, Lucifer stood before them in an apparition of a human woman. Her flesh was half-rotted, peeling.
Adam’s soul twisted inside of him. “Mom?” it called aloud so his voice rang through the cage.
“Adam,” Lucifer gasped. “I’m sorry it took me so long to find you. Once I heard you were here in Hell, I started looking right away.”
Grief and misery washed over them in a wave. “You were in Hell?” he wailed.
Adam, Michael admonished. That is not your mother.
His words had no effect. “Mom, why – you’re a good person, you shouldn’t be here.”
“It’s because of you, Adam,” she said. “I was in Heaven, but when they heard what you did…”
Devastation came next. Desolation. It felt like Michael did when he prayed to God and got no response. He reached inside himself, desperate, and almost drew Adam out of him entirely. The soul peeked out, a glitter in the dark.
Lucifer’s eyes went wide in delight.
Michael pushed Adam back inside, but higher, dragging him through he reached the place where his knowledge was kept. It was a wide, expansive place, too full for a human, and he felt the soul recoil. He held him fast, though he fought.
Lucifer’s eyes narrowed again as he realized what was happening. His shape contorted all at once, unfolding to its full height, and then he lunged.
Adam slipped from his grasp and fell into the knowing place, disappeared. Michael didn’t have time to panic, though he knew the human could be lost in there forever. He raised his wings to shield himself from Lucifer’s talons, then lashed back with all his might. It was harder than he remembered their fights being, and it dragged on longer, for he did not have the strength to overpower Lucifer quickly. Months passed like that.
A year.
Two.
Five.
The hollow space inside him cried out for the Host, but no response would come. His blows fell weaker, Lucifer’s striking more painfully. When he overwhelmed his brother, Michael stepped back and they both took respite. He realized that Lucifer would not do the same.
Just as he feared the worst, a voice cried out inside him in the language of revelation. An Enochian prayer, older than the fall. Older than mankind and time and the Earth. It said, Our God has formed the nothing into a place for us. Our God has beaten back The Darkness and given us the light. Our God has cast down Leviathan that creation may survive. Our God shall build wonders from the void. O, God, we praise thee.
It was the first prayer the Host sang after the lesser angels were made. Back then, thousands of voices raised the chorus so that it wove all of Heaven together as one. Now, only one voice sang, and it did not sing to God.
Adam sang to Michael.
His form rose, billowing upward and outward until it towered over Lucifer’s. Michael felt Adam slip from the place of knowing back to the void where God should have been, and he felt Adam redouble his worship in that place. Adam spoke his name, Michael, spoke his name, Michahel, Mitxel, Miguel, Mikhailu, and all the other names given to him by man, and last of all the old name, the question, Mi ki ‘el? Who is like God?
Michael struck down at his brother, swift and fierce, and when Lucifer fell, he stayed down. Slowly, he dragged himself back to his corner of the cage, no helpless plaything to comfort him now.
The prayers did not cease. They filled him so Michael could almost feel the Host, so that when he tipped his face upward, he could imagine the cage opening above them, could imagine flying out and into the light.
The cage stayed shut.
Thank you, he thought.
In return, Adam thought of very old things, things he should not have known. The primordial ooze at the beginning of mortal life. The first sunrise. Adam and Eve laying together in the garden before they knew shame, and how Michael watched the rapture on their faces and thought how strange they seemed, how he wondered if their joining felt like the Host.
You found all of this? Michael asked. I only hoped for you to understand Lucifer’s tricks.
Adam’s soul flared bright and stretched wide. I understand that… and a few other things, he said.
There were more battles after that. Lucifer preyed on them with tricks and illusions. He appealed to Adam directly, tried to drive them apart. Each time, Michael felt Adam sink even deeper inside him. In their moments of respite, after Michael beat Lucifer down hard enough to quiet him for a time, they sometimes whispered prayers back and forth to one another. They made new prayers in new languages that would mean nothing to anyone but the two of them.
I am your vessel, you my God, Adam murmured into the place of revelation.
Michael whispered back: I am your vessel, you my God.
Lucifer got a look in his eye when he was ready to attack anew, like the malice and discontent within him built up slowly until it had no place left to go but his fists. Michael soothed himself against Adam’s presence as he prepared for the next onslaught.
“You’ve completely devoured him, haven’t you?” Lucifer asked.
Michael did not deign to ask who.
“I bet his soul isn’t even recognizable now. What I did to Sam Winchester, I bet it was nothing compared to whatever you’ve turned your bunkmate into.”
Adam twisted inside him, and it was for that reason that Michael replied, “I’ve done nothing to him.”
Lucifer laughed. “He’s been inside you for centuries. You’ve digested him.”
“He’s right here, whole.” Michael placed an appendage over his middle.
“Let’s do a little show-and-tell, then,” he leered. “If you haven’t absorbed him, take him out. Let’s see how whole he is.”
Michael huffed. “Your tricks are getting lazy.” He felt inside himself for the warm place where Adam began. The edges were blurred now, but that made them more whole, not less.
The black smoke that surrounded them grew agitated in a way they had never seen before, like a storm brewing behind it.
Lucifer said, “What…” and before he could finish his question, purple lightning flashed from the clouds, struck him, and he vanished.
Michael stared at the emptiness where his brother had been for centuries.
He’s gone? Adam asked.
They waited a long while, quiet, barely thinking. Just waiting. Lucifer did not return.
What would come for him but not us? Adam asked.
Michael spoke to him aloud, for there was no one else to hear him speak. “None will come for us. We are all we have. This has been true since we came to this place.”
Adam murmured a prayer in Enochian. When he prayed, he now filled the hole inside Michael so well that he pressed into the solid vessel around it and bled into Michael’s being.
Perhaps Lucifer, wherever he went, had gotten one final trick in, because Michael wondered suddenly what Adam’s soul looked like now. It had been hidden for so long. “I’m going to take you out,” he decided. “There is nothing to protect you from.”
A jolt of panic coursed through them, but he ignored it. Michael reached in and wrapped an appendage around Adam’s soul. It dragged and clung to his insides as he pulled it out. The surface of his form bulged. Something stuck, the chasm inverting as it was tugged along with him, but Michael remained persistent, dragging the glowing ball of warmth out and out.
He could not remove all of it, and parts of Michael’s own form pulled out with him. It left a small hole, prolapsed, open into his place of revelation. Still, most of the soul was Adam, and it was more beautiful than he remembered. More beautiful than anything had the right to be in this place.
“Was he right?” Adam asked, his soul squirming in Michael’s grasp. “You can’t get me out. Did I change?”
“For the better,” Michael replied.
Without Lucifer and his violence to fill the years, they no longer needed to savor their moments of respite with such greed. Michael and Adam, for the first time, had to work at passing the time. They sang their prayers, as always, but by then, even when they invented new ones, the other already knew the words and they could only speak them in unison.
Sometimes, Michael put Adam inside, and other times kept him out, conjoined but able to look upon one another. Pulling him out created a tension, almost pain, but there was ecstasy in it, too, the anticipation of the deep-seated satisfaction that would inevitably follow when he slipped back in and Michael’s insides returned to their correct placement.
Sometimes Adam moved inside him of his own accord, rearranging pieces of Michael as he did so, bringing the void of revelation to the place of knowing, the place of knowing to the core of his grace, twisting them and then untangling them again.
One day, Adam said, “I want to look at my body.”
The thought was so individual, so spontaneous, that it startled Michael. He rose and moved to the place they left it, all those ages ago. It was hardly recognizable anymore: a blackened, shriveled lump of carbon. It was hard to imagine how important that body had been to him once.
“If you could fix it,” Adam mused, “would it just burn again?”
Michael thought through the logistics. “If I kept it connected to my grace, I could maintain its integrity for a time. I could restore it, but for what purpose?”
Adam’s soul strained at the surface, peeking out and shining his light on the desiccated flesh. “I forgot what it looks like is all. I used to think it was the same as me, you know. I was a medical student. I studied the body, electrical impulses in the brain. I thought the soul was just a series of reactions in the body.”
“Strange,” Michael thought. “The body can’t survive without the soul, but the soul easily survives without the body.”
“Not on Earth.” A tendril of Adam’s soul stretched toward the body, spilling over its charred wrinkles. “Not even you could survive on Earth without my body.”
Michael lifted the corpse, tiny in his grasp, and turned it over. So easily destroyed, but Adam was right, of course. Essential to existence on Earth. And big enough inside for both Adam’s soul and his own grace. “We – angels – talk about vessels as if we are inside the human,” he realized, “but that’s not true. We cohabitate with the soul inside the body. So perhaps we also mistake the body and soul as one.”
“Could you ever…” Adam began, and trailed off. He hadn’t shown such hesitation in Michael’s presence for a long, long time.
“Ask me,” he pleaded.
“Could your grace fit inside my soul the way my soul fits inside your grace?” Adam asked.
The very thought of it sent a stab of strange hunger through Michael, so intense that Adam must have felt it. They felt most things together now. The chasm of revelation, distended with the attached soul peeking outside of him, went bright-hot. “You are blended with my insides,” Michael said, imagining what contortions would be required to do such a thing. “I would need to turn them to my outsides and turn my outsides in.”
“And they would all be inside me,” Adam agreed.
Michael wanted nothing more. “We could place ourselves inside the vessel,” he thought aloud. “Not cohabitating. When you operate the vessel, I will be inside of you. When I operate it, you will be inside me. It would be…” He searched for an adequate word. Found none in Enochian.
“Intimate,” Adam suggested in English.
The word settled into the heated chasm and felt right.
“What’s that feeling?” Michael asked, laughing at the strange emotion rising within them, like bubbles from the bottom of a lake.
Deep inside, Adam said, “We’re surprised.”
Michael considered debating the semantics over whether it was their surprise or Adam’s alone, but only asked, “What are we surprised about?” He stretched the arms of Adam’s body outward, testing the limitations of their movement.
“I thought it would feel small.” Adam shifted inside him, pressing effortlessly into the edges of the place of revelation, venturing outward and slipping through Michael’s grace, as if testing out that everything was exactly where it had been before. “My body is so much smaller than you. I thought we would shrink.”
His first instinct was to reach inside, to still Adam’s motions, but when Michael made to do so, the flesh hand moved, pressing to the flesh chest, and he stopped. He had control of the vessel now, but Adam had free reign over their insides. It had not been that way before the cage. Back then, he placed Adam somewhere confined, a corner of his own mind, and his soul was entirely separate from Michael’s grace.
“All bodies are bigger on the inside,” he explained. He took a step, contemplating the sensation of the cage floor against the bottom of his foot, which was confined inside a human-made shoe. “They contain universes, after all. Millions of generations of bacteria live and die within a single human body. The soul inhabits it. Suitable vessels for angels, they are larger still, able to accommodate grace. Your family line, they are the largest of all.”
A restless hesitation thrummed through Adam’s soul.
“Are you ready to switch?” Michael asked.
The response came quiet, eager: “Yes.”
Michael lay the vessel flat on the floor so he would not have to mind its operation. Then, turning his attention inward, he found Adam’s soul in the place of revelation. “You need to open up for me,” he instructed. “It will feel strange.”
“I’m not sure how to start.” Adam’s soul quivered.
Michael pushed inward, like he would to manipulate Adam’s soul within him, but instead of moving him, he applied gentle pressure. “Just relax,” he said. “Just let me in.”
Adam’s body outside them made a sound like a gasp, and the soul began to part, just the smallest of openings.
He poured his grace inside, moving swiftly so it could not tighten up again, slow but inexorable as he pressed into the space. It was burning hot, like the inside of a lightning strike, and the more of himself Michael put in, the more Adam opened wide for him until at last they reached the place where they were both connected, where they caught.
“Are you ready?” Michael asked.
“It’s like a somersault,” Adam said.
“What’s that?”
Adam laughed, the feeling of it wiggling through his soul and escaping, softly, from the body’s lips. “I’ll show you after we’re done.”
They moved in unison, Michael inverting himself as he pressed the last edges in, Adam folding backwards around his grace, letting it pull his soul over the opening he’d used to climb inside.
For a moment, all was dark. Then the soul exploded in brilliant light, like the burning dust in a comet tail, like water whooshing through the cells of an old tree, like the halo of a black hole. It overwhelmed him. He lost his sense of time, of the cage, of the vessel outside.
Glimmers like electricity darted back and forth ahead of him. Michael moved toward them and put his grace in the path of one. It struck him in his core, and he felt suddenly small. Small, but it didn’t frighten him. He felt cared for. Loved. The mirage of a memory overtook him, of a soft shirt over a warm chest, arms wrapped around him and a woman’s wavering voice singing about how loved he was.
Another strike, and the love evaporated into pain and anger, heard himself crying loudly. An older boy shoved him into the snow. His clothes were wet, and a grownup wasn’t going to do anything about it. He said Adam needed to learn to stick up for himself. The anger rose and crested, and he lunged with both hands at the other boy, shoved him back into the snow, and how was that for sticking up for himself?
A jolt, and embarrassment wrapped around something so big, so physical he didn’t know what to call it. There was a girl sitting next to him on the bus, and he noticed everything about her body. She made his nerves overreact, made his blood rush to his face and his penis, and he hoped, he really hoped she wouldn’t notice.
Confusion and terrifying hope. A man stretching his hand forward and saying, “It’s good to meet you, Adam,” and it was like a hole he’d never known was there had opened up in his past, all the places where a father ought to have been, and he was trying to take this man, this stranger, and fill them with him in retrospect.
Pain. Grief. His mother’s wavering voice gone to screams as the creature ate her, and he knew how much pain she was in, because he felt it, too felt teeth at his throat, then –
Michael had no frame of reference for what he experience next, seeing the inside of his grace through Adam’s point of view, filtered through the thrumming energy of the inside of Adam’s soul. Effortlessly, a memory came to him. Not one of his own. Sitting in a science classroom. The teacher placed four mirrors together in a square, facing inward, and let each student poke their head up inside. He suddenly understood the idea of infinity, because his face, the frames of the mirrors, they went on forever.
“Recursive,” Michael said.
Outside, the vessel jolted. “Did you say something?” Adam asked.
“We have become recursive,” Michael explained. Then, sensing Adam’s odd mix of relief and excitement, he wondered, “How long was I exploring your soul?”
“Many years.” Adam smoothed the body’s hand against its chest.
Michael thought about Adam, alone in the cage for years singing prayers only to himself. He reached for the edges of his grace, where it bled into Adam’s soul. He pressed tight so Adam would feel him. A strange feeling came over him, oppressive as a storm. Regret? No. Sorrow? Not quite.
“Oh, Michael,” Adam sighed. “You don’t need to feel guilty. I knew you were in there. You just got lost. That’s all.”
“I did,” Michael agreed. “It’s very large in here.”
Adam’s body smiled and went warm. The hands kept stroking over skin, like he was trying to touch Michael back. “When I was lost in you, I learned Enochian,” he recalled. “Did you learn anything?”
Another memory came, this time of a girl with long red hair and pink cheeks and a habit of biting her lip and looking away when Adam told her how beautiful she was. They were dancing, low colorful lights glinting off streamers strung through a high school gymnasium. Swaying. The music slow. She stepped in closer and rested her head on his chest.
“I think I learned how to be in love,” Michael realized.
Adam wrapped the body’s arms around itself in a hug. “Oh, good,” he sighed.
The touching and stroking were just some of the new habits Adam developed while Michael was lost in his soul. He hummed aloud between prayers, pressing his fingers to his throat to feel the vibrations. He spent long stretches of time inspecting his skin.
“I think I had a scar here,” he declared one day, prodding the body’s knee.
Michael pulled through Adam’s memories and found a jarring, frightening image of a bicycle crashing into a tree, and then blood and crying. “When I healed the body from the damage the cage did, I did so indiscriminately,” he said. “Do you want it back?”
“No,” Adam said, placid. “That’s alright.” He touched his own face. “No chance you could create a mirror for us, hm?”
He thought about it. Illusions were easy here, even easier than on earth. In a blink, Michael created a double of the body, an extension of the current but separate, physically, and placed himself in its perspective so he could control its movements.
They looked at one another. Adam’s face was as young as it had been all those centuries ago, but it was older, too. Calm where his younger self had been confused. Adoring where it had been frightened. Wise where it had been cynical. His mouth dropped into a small ‘O.’
The main body stepped closer to the illusion, eyes flitting over it. “I thought it would be like looking at myself,” Adam said. “But it doesn’t feel like me anymore.” He reached up and pressed two fingers to the illusion’s cheekbone. He startled. “I can feel it,” he said.
“Yes,” Michael agreed, moving the illusion’s mouth as he spoke. “The illusion of touch is as easy to create as the illusion of sight. The cage is not a physical place. Everything we’ve felt through the body has been an illusion in some way.”
He could feel it, too, the way Adam’s fingers skimmed across the face, mapping the line of brows, nose, lips. “Are you in here?” he asked
“I am still in you,” Michael reassured, though Adam could surely feel that. “But I’m here, too. I’m looking at you through these eyes.”
A warmth that burned toward hunger rushed through them. Adam-the-body licked his lips. “I’d like to kiss you,” he confessed.
Michael found he wanted that very much. He nodded.
Adam’s lips were soft and slow. He expected it to just feel like the electrical impulses of nerves sending illusory pressure signals to the brain. Instead, it felt like Adam, felt like the relief that came when Adam pulled out of him and then pressed back. It made him remember Adam’s first kiss, awkward at a middle school party and she tasted like candy, and his tenth kiss, a puppy love greeting in a high school hallway, and his two hundred and twentieth kiss, trembling as Adam pressed his genitals inside another human’s for the very first time, and it was frightening and exciting and intimate and he felt in love.
He did what Adam did back then, pressed his tongue to the seam of Adam’s lips, and Adam let it inside, easy as anything. They knew what the other would do before he did it, but every move was still a surprise, winning gasps and shudders. Hands stroked Michael-the-illusion’s face, and Michael’s hands found the breadth of Adam’s ribs, gripped them tight.
“Turn us,” Adam panted against his lips. “I want to be inside you again.”
They both reached inside for their soul-grace and rolled it in unison, pulling the grace from the soul, tucking the soul inside the grace, and then Adam was enormous inside him, expanded from so many years on the outside, filling him more than revelation ever had.
Adam-the-illusion lay Michael-the-body on the smoldering floor of the cage and pressed their genitals together so that their misled nerves lit up like a star before it collapsed. Adam-the-illusion straddled his hips, and took Michael inside of him. There was no resistance and no pain because they did not think to create such sensations. Only the feeling of being inside Adam, who was inside him.
Recursive.
“Again,” Michael pleaded, and they rolled the grace-soul until it was Adam inside Michael inside Adam. They moved the body-illusion and turned the soul-grace until neither could be sure who was in and who was out.
The illusion’s legs wrapped around the body’s waist, pulling him in deeper. Adam whispered, “There is an end to this, when it’s done on earth.”
Michael saw Adam seated at a computer, his hand flying over his skin in frantic chase of – of relief, of release. Orgasm. Saw him going still inside a girl, felt thighs going tight around his ears as that same girl cried out in sudden ecstasy. “Is that what you want?” Michael asked.
Their grace-soul rolled over. “Not yet,” Adam decided.
And so they stayed for many years.
When the end came, Michael remembered the birth of the first stars, as clear as if it was happening right there in Adam’s eyes.
One day, as Adam strolled through memories of Heaven, Michael realized suddenly that he would not go back there, if he could choose now. He laughed.
Adam sat with his back to Michael’s chest, their hands clasped together. He tipped his head back and smiled. “What?”
“Designing a paradise that was not a prison was always one of Father’s greatest struggles,” Michael explained. “True happiness – it’s nearly impossible to create, especially for a soul that has suffered. So you take a soul, you trap it in an illusion, a loop of its happiest moments, but it’s not real. Most souls, they don’t want to know this. They don’t care. They’re content. Others can tell.”
“It sounds like God failed.”
Michael hummed his agreement. “And yet you and I – have we created paradise in the deepest pit of Hell? Did we succeed where he could not?”
Adam kissed him.
And so, when the door to the cage flew open, millennia after they entered, Adam and Michael did not go out. They sat still, drawn together in one being, and they waited.
I pray it closes, Adam spoke inside of Michael’s grace. I pray nothing comes through.
The door did not close, and after some time, strange sounds from outside reached them through the swirling storm that surrounded the cage.
For the first time since Lucifer left, Michael thought of tactics, of defensive strategy. He thought to Adam, This is a bad place to be cornered if something comes for us. We have nowhere to run.
What could come for us that we could not defeat? You fought Lucifer for eons, and we are more now than we were then.
Michael thought of their careless blasphemy, of claiming to have created paradise greater than Heaven.
God, he said.
They left at once.