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Adam is dead and there is a stranger in his body.
There is no ghost of him, no remnant in the fingertips, touch void of familiarity.
*
Michael says, in Adam's voice, that he misses Adam. That he is sorry. Kevin tells him to shut up. To shut the hell up.
*
He can not look into the eyes of the body that Knew his, not anymore. The eyes of the body are the same shade of blue, but the light behind them is cold. The light is cold. The skin is cold.
The body is a corpse and it decays in time with Kevin's soul. His mind.
He swears, he can hear his voice. His Voice.
It does not come from the body, the wretched body that holds itself wrong, that squares its shoulders and keeps its knees straight.
'Bend your knees.' Kevin would drop to the ground and beg for it, if he thought he could get back up.
'You are standing wrong, and you need to bend your knees before they hyperextend.'
The body will not feel its knees hyperextend.
*
There is a night when the body is on his bed.
On the edge, legs folded neatly —wrong.— lips and fingers tinged blue in the moonlight. Hands clasped. The body is failing.
Kevin sees the body on his bed and he screams.
It's the loudest he's been, yet the body does not flinch. He hates the stranger. For not caring enough to be afraid. For acting as though it isn't going mad. The stranger is going mad, and he can feel it.
He screams and somehow he shakes and shudders and collapses to his knees, to his knees, if he could've gotten there sooner, things may have been okay.
They may have had it, for a moment, if Kevin Tran had gotten on his knee, put his father's ring to real use.
His skin burns with the iron and flame of those eyes on him, the eyes of the body, watching as he falls to pieces in utter, lung-bursting silence.
The soul that the body belongs to would not have let him fall apart.
He would have risen, he would have taken the boy on the floor into his arms and let him lay against his heartbeat, listen to the drum within his chest until he could breathe again.
He would have risen.
He should have risen.
He should have risen.
The body rises, at some point.
Kevin does not remember what he throws at the body, at the stranger, it shatters against the wall nearby.
He does not remember anything.
Only that the body departs, and that the floor is cold until long after sunrise.
*
He wishes he could tell the stranger to get out of the body. He has tried. The stranger is attached to the body, has held it for so long.
The stranger, the angel, has not held the body in the same way as Kevin has.
The angel does not understand how it feels to watch air slide in and out of those lungs and to comb that hair out of correctness, to dare for something foreign in the part of his bangs, to feel breath upon his face as they gravitate close.
The angel has never pirated a favorite movie, pausing it and listening, listening, to all the thoughts that spill from lips, soft in shape, in enunciation. His enunciation is soft.
The enunciation was soft and the speech was lax, and he would die a thousand times to be annoyed by it again.
He can not bear to hear the body speak. He puts on his headphones, and Adam's favorite album makes Kevin's mouth taste like static.
He can't remember the taste of the body when the soul was inside.
*
He wonders how Death could come so swiftly.
Did Death hold those hands?
Did Death kiss that head?
Did Death comfort that little boy?
He hopes Death returns, sweetly. He would not fight Her.
He would welcome Her, as sweetly as She comes.
He does not remember if he gets up that day.
*
Kevin Tran is losing his mind.
Kevin Tran is losing his will to live.
There is nothing in this hell.
There is nothing.
There is his poisonous, crumbling mind, and there is the stranger inside the body.
There is the body, as it decays.
If it decays, will the stranger leave?
He doesn't know. He doesn't care.
*
Death is gentle.
She asks Kevin Tran why he is looking for Her. She calls him honey.
It makes him think of his mother and for a moment, the brief and terrifying sensation that had gripped him, that had pushed him to gather the components to a spell— it disappears. It drains away and leaves him empty, again.
He does not know why he called Death.
He wants Her to—
To what?
He is sorry.
Kevin Tran apologizes the way he was taught.
Death lifts the shame in his shoulders and She makes him stand up.
Death knows Her plans.
He wishes She would tell him.
The body is somewhere else as this happens.
He does not care where the angel is.
The absence of the body sets him ill.
*
Kevin Tran does not summon Death again, though he does not avoid Her. He teases Death, flutters his lashes as he walks under ladders.
Death is silent. She does not answer him.
He is losing.
He has nearly nothing left.
*
Most nights are a void. The dreams grow distant, the voice of the body harder to remember.
The enunciation is now too soft, and the words grow loose and spill together. He can not understand.
He walks in the sand, forever, those hands and shoulders just out of reach. He reaches and reaches and grasps onto nothing.
He wakes up cold.
*
The body is gone.
*
Kevin Tran wonders if it will be worth it, when he dies.
If the soul will be there.
If the soul will be waiting for him.
Or—!
Or if the soul has forgotten.
Perhaps the soul is back in its –his– heaven and all feels right. Perhaps the soul is in school again, and the prom date is there.
Perhaps the prom date is all the soul needs.
He is facedown on the table and he wonders if the prom date ever pirates movies.
*
He is alone.
Until he isn't.
Until there is a hand on his shoulder and on his face and it is so warm, the hands are so warm that he sobs.
And he looks into eyes too similar and for the first time, tears spill like rain.
It takes a long time to recognize the hands, and the eyes, but Dean is patient.
"God, kid."
Dean does not say that Kevin looks bad. He does not have to say it in words. His eyes are shifting and shattering with pain.
Kevin doesn't know.
He doesn't care.
The body is gone and he is alone in their tomb.
A corpse with no companion.
Dean takes that corpse, the living one, into daylight.
Outside.
He's forgotten how big the sky is.
How vast.
How blue.
How the wind feels.
How the earth breathes.
Dean is alone with blood on his sleeve, a handprint where his heart should have rested.
Upon his arm, blazing and sparking out love like a broken plug, not locked tight in the tomb of his chest.
Dean knows that deep and that empty that consumes them both.
And Dean doesn't speak, and Kevin doesn't speak.
They watch the sun rise.
They watch another day come.