The Wheels On The Bus Chapter 16

Jack sways slightly, feeling himself lose balance even though he’s standing on even ground. He holds onto the rails surrounding the booth to steady himself. 

His stomach feels like there’s hornets buzzing around in it, a nervous energy snaking up the rest of his limbs that makes him suddenly understand why people pace when they feel troubled. Something’s wrong.

The best he can describe what he’s feeling is that it’s like he’s sensing that something inside of him is hollow, and the hollowness of it is uncomfortable. He doesn’t know why this is, though. He’s fine, he’s not injured; all he’s been doing since Dean and Adam left is stand out here with his father, staying alert for any sign of danger. 

Carefully, he lets a miniscule amount of grace sweep through the room, trying to see if there’s anything suspicious inside, maybe someone who’s been possessed and is hiding in plain sight. He comes up with nothing.

It might just be a bad feeling from everything that’s happening, so he tries to reach out to everyone else, check in how they are doing on each of their ends. He finds Adam easily enough, even though his mind feels alarmingly still like he’s in shock, and Belphegor is surprisingly close enough to reach, his mind feeling like it’s overflowing with distress and grief. 

And - 

Jack feels like the ground’s being pulled out from under his feet. 

He reaches out, tries to grasp at the familiar feeling of the archangel’s thoughts, but no matter how hard he searches, he can’t find any connection to Michael. Just the hollow space left by it.

“Something happened,” he says, getting his father’s attention.

Castiel turns to him, concerned. “What is it?”

Jack feels his hands shake. He clenches his fists to make them stop. They don’t. “I can’t feel Michael anymore.”

-

Adam Milligan was nineteen years old when he died. 

It was painful, in the fact that he never saw it coming, that it could have been avoided if John Winchester had just given a damn and told his mother the truth about the supernatural, and the fact that since then, he’s never seen his mom. 

And the fact that he was eaten alive, of course, but he still keeps thinking about those three things until now, so when he thinks about his death, he thinks about everything else other than the physical pain of it. The memory of physical pain dulls down a thousand years later, anyway.

He and Michael say it’s been ten years because it’s easier to adapt to Earth that way. It’s easier for Adam, really, if they frame the way they think about time by Earth’s linear calendar. It’s a delicate balance; spending years of isolation in Hell, coming back to an Earth that’s so, so different from what Adam remembers (if he even remembers anything correctly anymore) and trying to stay sane. It’s easier to simplify things, for his sake. Michael insists on it. 

Michael likes looking after him like that. He’s been looking after him since the Cage, in the same way Adam looks after him - an accord they’d struck with each other after Michael told him to shut the fuck up and stop singing Mamma Mia, and Adam told him to deal with it if he was going to be a snobby elitist prick. They’d had a rocky start, but they’d had nothing but time to get over that rocky start, in the Cage. And, in between snickering at Lucifer under their breaths every time the archangels stopped fighting long enough for there to be hushed conversations, they’d managed. 

Adam isn’t surprised - although if he’d been told when he had actually been nineteen that he’d end up being best friends with an archangel, he’d probably have thought it was a bad joke before forgetting about it. He and Michael are very different people who’d bonded over laughing at a situation they probably shouldn’t have laughed at. 

And for a long, long time, they were alone. Alone, and there was no longer any need for hushed conversations. No need for Michael to hide him from Lucifer’s angry, bitter clutches.

The silence had been a lot more frightening than the explosions of light and grace were. At least those were something to process, something to experience. The Cage was vast and endless, and it was very, very empty. Adam could walk forever and never find an edge, never find any cage bars to give the place its name, because it wasn’t so  much a literal cage as a space of pure void meant to never connect to anything. It was just a true empty.

“Like the universe before it began,” Michael had told him.

“Huh,” Adam had said, lying flat on his back in the nothing and staring up at the equally flat nothing of what should have been the ceiling. “I thought there was chaos and water and wind.”

“Oh, there was, before everything was created, but the universe already existed then, it was just unformed. In the beginning, there was nothing,” Michael said. “And this is all that remains of that nothing.”

“The corner of the paper your dad forgot to doodle in,” Adam had said and Michael at that point had stopped telling him to cease his blasphemy and had just rolled all of his many, many eyes. 

Michael had lived for millenia and had a vast, vast mind, and while the Cage was an empty nothing, it didn’t do anything to prevent archangels from creating illusions out of memories, and the archangel had obliged for Adam. It was fun to pass time that way, listening to human history from the eyes of an angel, attempting to recreate Adam’s own memories from whatever Michael took his descriptions to mean and laughing at the hilarity of things being lost in translation. 

They were alone, but at the very least they were alone together.

Then Hell opened up.

But they’d stuck together, still. Heaven was a mess and Adam didn’t trust the angels to let him in anyway, and he had no plans to live out the rest of his existence staying stationary in only one memory. All of the other archangels were dead, and Michael wasn’t too keen on facing anyone else yet, not after years and years of isolation. 

The world was strange and the world was new to them in so many ways, and even though they were surrounded by so many things, they were laughably still alone. Still only had each other.

And now, no matter how hard Adam searches, pushing at the grace woven into his soul to look for the thread that linked his and Michael’s thoughts together for this stupidly dangerous mission, he can’t find anything. He’s waving his hand over a cliff, finding nothing but air.

His brain grinds to a halt. 

Michael’s not there. 

Michael’s not there. 

He knows there’s tears streaming down his face. He can feel them. He can feel his nose clogging up and he can feel how his knees hurt - he’s fallen to the floor, absolutely stunned - and he can feel how much his hands are shaking. But his brain is a blank, not even the mental static that suffocates it from when he tunes the rest of the world out due to sensory overload.

Michael’s gone. 

Belphegor is crying, hunched over and holding the crook to his chest, choking down ugly sobs as quietly as he can like he’s afraid of making too much noise. There’s no tears for him, not with the absence of working tear ducts, but his shoulders are shaking and Adam can practically feel the grief rolling off of him in waves. 

He’s never been the most open with his thoughts. He’s always been fond of deflecting and distracting and being a general ass so people never got too close to him. 

Adam trusts himself to be a good judge of character, though, and this is genuine. 

It’s this thought that makes Adam force himself to come back to reality, a herculean effort given how much he just wants to curl up into a ball and scream. 

“Belphegor,” he says. The demon raises his head, slowly, blank eyesockets looking up at him. Adam realizes then that he’s not wearing his glasses, and he’s only just noticed. “Belphegor, show me what happened.”

“What?” Belphegor asks, confused, too deep in his grief to register what Adam means.

“Show me what happened,” Adam says, holding out a shaky hand. The demon frowns, but slowly, he processes the words. His expression turns confused again, but this time it’s at where Adam’s going with this, but he reaches a hand out to meet Adam’s, palm facing down.

The rush of memories is thick with guilt, but Adam parses through it, from the moment Belphegor and Michael left the school, down to Belphegor being unceremoniously shoved through space back to the main hall. Adam watches the images flash by in his mind’s eye.

The demon, the Haxon ring. Chuck, standing there smiling. Michael stepping forward and moving just a bit to the side to make sure that Belphegor was behind him. Michael talking and bouncing insults off of Chuck when he normally would have answered in curt, but harsh responses. 

Belphegor feeling himself being pulled backwards, realizing what’s happening and reaching out towards Michael because he’s being so fucking stupid.

Go save everyone.

A single thought and a smile.

Adam blinks himself back into the present.

He wipes the tears from his eyes. He stands.

“He’s gonna be alright,” he says. 

Belphegor’s voice catches itself in his throat when he tries to talk, but instead of trying again, he pauses. After a while, he says, “...explain?”

“He wasn’t telling you to save everyone because he thought he was going to die,” Adam says. “He told you to save everyone because time is of the essence and you’re the one who needs to use the crook without interruptions.”

“You - what - are you sure?” Belphegor looks like he’s not trying to be relieved prematurely. “You’re really sure?”

“I spent a thousand or so years with the guy, Bel, give me some credit,” Adam says, laughing lightly. It makes him tear up again, but he brushes the tears away with the back of his hand. 

“But how do you know that?” Belphegor says. “Chuck was there, anything could happen.”

“I know. I know anything could happen,” Adam says. “But I also know that Michael’s a strategist, and he’s not gonna sacrifice himself in a situation where we need all the firepower we can get. He’s not gonna do anything without a plan. So he sent you here, to save everyone, and then when that threat is gone.” Adam smiles. “He trusts that we’re gonna save his dumb ass.”

Belphegor only stares at him for a minute in disbelief, but Adam’s confident. He knows Chuck is dangerous, but he also knows Michael is a smart son of a bitch, and he’s definitely not the martyr type. They just have to be smart enough to find a way to save him.

“You’re both fucking insane,” Belphegor breathes, leaning back on the wall behind him. He looks to the side, and then, like a thought’s come to him, he laughs. His laughter grows until he’s clutching his stomach.

“Ah, fuck,” Belphegor says, standing up, hefting up the crook. “You both have similar taste, and it just so happens you both fit in what you’re looking for, huh?”

Adam kicks his shin. Belphegor’s too tired to actually dodge so it connects and he lets out a hiss in pain, hopping on his good foot backwards.

“Little shit!” Belphegor yells.

“People might be dying outside, use the fucking crook like he told you to,” Adam says.

Belphegor laughs again, instinctively wiping at his eyes, like he’s forgotten he can’t cry anything. “Yeah, yeah, whatever,” he says. When he straightens up and pulls his hands away from where he’s wiped at his eyes, two bright yellow irises are looking at Adam. 

“Huh,” Adam says. “So there literally would have been no difference between that body’s old eyes and yours?”

Belphegor nearly whacks him over the head with the crook. Adam ducks and laughs this time.

“People are dying outside, shut the fuck up,” Belphegor says. The light in his eyes are dying out to a lovely shade of brown. He raises the crook to his lips. “Let’s get this over with and save your angel.”

-

Jack’s a step away from the gym’s exit when he hears the crook ringing out, loud and clear all around the school. The ground underneath him starts to shake.

He looks up. Castiel, who’d been attempting to dissuade him from following Michael and Belphegor into Hell for the last several minutes, looks up. There’s relief in his face.

“They did it,” he says. “They found the crook.”

Belphegor had been close. He must be back in the school then, this has got to be him. 

But then, where’s Michael?

Jack tries to search for him again, trying to connect to his thoughts, but he still can’t find anything. He shoves the gym doors open and bolts down the hallway. 

“Jack!” his father calls out behind him.

Michael’s in danger. He can’t be dead, not him. He’s an archangel, he’s not gonna go down easily. But he’s in danger, and Jack and the others have to save him.

His shoes make a sharp sound across the floor as he forces himself to a stop as soon as he’s in the main hall. Belphegor is standing there with Adam, who looks like he’s been crying. The demon’s got the crook and is playing it, as loud as he can. When he runs out of breath, he tries again, keeping the crook held high. 

“Five!” Adam yells over the sound.

Jack makes his way over to the doors, slowly, putting his hands over his ears. There’s so many ghosts outside, but they’re not moving. They’re just standing there, all facing the school with blank looks on their faces. The hunters around them are swatting them down in droves, with whatever iron objects they’re holding in their hands. 

Belphegor’s run out of breath. There’s a brief pause, but thankfully, nothing happens. 

“Six!” Adam yells out. He’s counting the amount of times Belphegor’s playing.

The crook sounds out again. Still, the ghosts outside do not move, and the hunters are cutting through them easily. After a few minutes, Belphegor pauses. 

“Seven,” Adam says.

Belphegor plays the crook one final time, and then, silence. 

Jack turns just in time to see the poor guy nearly collapse. Adam catches him before he does and helps him sit. 

“Are you okay?” Jack asks, running over to them. “Where’s Michael - oh, wow.”

Belphegor looks up at him with actual eyes. Jack thinks he was probably doing them both a favor when he hadn’t healed the burnt eyesockets, because it’s unnerving looking at your doppelganger. 

But he looks like he’s been through hell and back, so Jack saves that for later. 

Castiel, having caught up, heads towards them. “What did you do?” he asks, taking in the crook on the floor and Belphegor looking ill.

“Michael told him to take control of every thing that came out of Hell,” Adam says. “So he did.”

“So - so everything - “ Jack turns to look at the doors again, before looking back to Belphegor, who gives up on sitting and just lies down on his back. “It’s okay now?”

“It better fucking be,” Belphegor says, squeezing his eyes shut. “I feel like I’m gonna puke.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Hell is massive and I can feel the entirety of it right now.”

Jack and Adam both wince.

“Where’s Michael?” Castiel asks.

Belphegor rolls over to throw up. Adam frowns, but not at him.

“We don’t know,” he says. “He sent Belphegor back with the crook.”

“Why?” Jack asks. The crook itself is lying beside Adam, thankfully far away from Belphegor’s sick. 

Adam takes a while to answer. When he does, he sounds grim. “Chuck was there.”

Jack stills.

Behind him, he hears the front doors of the school open, followed by several footsteps. The hunters are bringing all of their injured inside, Dean barking out orders for everyone else to attend to. 

“You guys got the crook?” he asks, stopping beside Cas. He glances at everyone, counting, and then frowns. “Where’s Michael?”

“Sent me back with the crook,” Belphegor manages to heave out, crawling away from his mess. He lies back down on the floor and stares up the ceiling. Jack gets the weird feeling of looking at an actual double again. Belphegor looks weird with healed eyes.

Dean appears to be of the same opinion. “Belphegor?”

“The one and only. Did you forget my face already?” 

Dean kicks his foot lightly. “Fucking smartass,” he says. “But where’s the archangel?’

“Chuck found them,” Adam says, “He sent Belphegor back to use the crook.”

Dean only frowns, looking at Belphegor suspiciously.

“Stop it, Dean,” Adam says, tired. “I saw his memories. I know he’s telling the truth.”

“He’s a yellow-eyed demon, he could have changed those memories,” Dean says.

“I know,” Adam says. “But I trust him.”

“Adam.”

“And he saved your asses, didn’t he?” Adam stands and spreads his palms, a gesture of giving up. He’s exhausted. “Look, I know he’s a demon. I know you barely know him. But can you please, please trust all of us right now? It’s not just Belphegor. It’s all four of us together on this.”

Dean doesn’t answer. 

“Dean,” Jack says. “I trust him too, if that means anything.”

The hunter turns to him, the harsh look in his eyes softening just a bit. Then he turns back to Belphegor, who sluggishly brings his attention from the ceiling to Dean.

“What?” he asks.

And then immediately seems to regret it when Dean steps forward. He looks like he wants to sit up and scramble back, but he’s too tired to do so, so the only thing he can do when Dean crouches beside Adam is stare at him, alert and ready to bolt but not sure if he can.

“Yellow eyes, huh,” Dean says.

“Yeeeees?” Belphegor says, unsure, and then, “I know you have a bad history with demons of that eye color, so I can wear contacts if you want.”

“You are such a fucking smartass, shut the fuck up,” Dean says, but he looks amused. He quiets, studying Belphegor for a moment, and Belphegor, a demon under a microscope, does nothing but stay still.

Dean clicks his tongue. “Good move, showing your eyes to say you’re not keeping secrets anymore,” he says.

Belphegor mock-gasps and puts a hand to his chest. “Oh, he has a brain.”

“You’re on thin ice, but keep making jokes like that, I will drown you in the lake myself, got it?”

“Yessir,” Belphegor says, with a little salute, but there’s clear relief on his face. 

Dean snorts, stands, and leaves with a kick to the demon’s foot again. “Clean your fucking mess too, I have hunters to do a headcount on,” he calls out as they watch him disappear down the hallway. 

Jack feels a smile creep up onto his face. At least some things are going right.

“That was easier than I thought,” Adam says.

“That may be the case, but I still don’t trust you,” Castiel says. Still, he holds a hand out for Belphegor to take. The demon makes a show of straining to reach it before Adam slaps him on the back to pitch him forward. He grasps Cas’ hand with a laugh, and Castiel helps him up. “What else did Michael instruct you to do?”

“He said to save everyone,” Belphegor says. “And - well, I wanted everything to stop attacking everyone, so all of Hell that’s on Earth is sort of frozen in place right now.”

“That gives us time,” Castiel says. “And an army.”

Belphegor nods. “We just need to know how to use it.”

“Can you tell where everything that belongs to Hell is on Earth?”

“I can...try? I’m not sure, my head feels like puree right now,” he says. 

“He should probably rest first,” Adam says. “Sam and Dean are gonna hold a meeting anyway. And - “ He looks at Jack. “We still have to save Michael.”

Jack nods. Earth may be saved from whatever’s spilled out of Hell’s gates right now, but there’s still the matter of stabilizing the universe and saving Michael. And maneuvering around Chuck so he doesn’t know that they’re trying to save Michael and fix the world, but apparently they’re going to have to be more careful than usual, because every precaution they took before still got Michael and Belphegor found out anyway.

Though - 

“Do you think we should still be careful?” Jack asks.

“What do you mean? Of course we should,” Castiel says.

“No, no, I meant - “ he shares a look with Belphegor and Adam. “We were careful, and Michael and Belphegor got found out anyway. Even if we do everything in our power to be careful, Chuck can still find out and we’re just gonna be fighting him with an arm tied behind our backs.”

“Yeah, but…” Adam starts, but then looks down at the floor, deep in thought. 

“You’re thinking about closing the rifts yourself again?” Belphegor asks.

“If it’s going to help, yes,” Jack says. 

“Jack.”

“Chuck has Michael,” Jack says. “We were careful, and Chuck has Michael. The only reason he’s not going after me right now is because he’s decided not to. Why not do something while I’m still here?”

“Jack, Belphegor’s right.” Castiel puts a hand on his shoulder. Jack blinks, stopping himself, remembering the look on Castiel’s face when they’d first reunited. 

The relief on his face. His death had broken his father’s heart. 

“I know, but,” Jack says. “What if we’re just squandering our luck because we’re holding back? We know Chuck’s weak to some degree anyway. That has to be something we can take advantage of, right?”

Adam has an idea. Jack can see it in his face, in the way his eyes widen and how his posture changes. 

Belphegor does too, apparently, because he’s twisting around trying to reach his back pockets, trying to get something out.

“What are you - “ Adam starts, but then Belphegor pulls out a wrinkled, battered bingo card and holds it up to his face.

“Luck!” he declares, and when he realizes he doesn’t make sense, seems to think fuck it anyway and continues to confuse them all by grinning like a madman, still holding the stupid card up. “Luck,” he says, “I think I know how we can save Michael.”