Fic

Hey everyone :) I found this fic unfinished on my hard drive this morning. I believe I wrote it back when SAW first came out and I havn't watched the movie since, so if things don't make sense, I apologise.

title: sense in madness
rating: PG
pairing: adam/lawrence
summary: Some people are so ungrateful to be alive, but not you, not anymore
disclaimer: I own nothing!
note: Lawrence has one of those Prosthetic feet. How charming.


If they’d spoken of it afterwards, Adam would have told Lawrence how the padlock key had been stuck in the plughole of the bathtub, how when he’d finally gotten over the shock and unlocked the chains around his ankles, the huge metal door barring him from the outside had rolled aside with ease.

Bloodied, scared and barely able to maneuver his limbs, he’d stumbled from their decrepit prison and into the network of sewer tunnels, blindly fumbling his way toward the street.

Terror was what fueled his journey to the surface. The gunshot wound throbbed in his shoulder and he could taste the salt-copper tang of blood and tears on his tongue. When he finally stopped running he had found himself in the foyer of the local police station. Wide-eyed bystanders watched as Adam fell to the linoleum floor and openly wept, Lawrence’s blood creeping through his white t-shirt and mingling with his own.

+

The sterile-white hospital did nothing for Adams mental health. Lawrence slept most of the time so Adam spent all day just staring out of the window, occasionally watching the blood from his shoulder wound seep into the gauze bandaging around it.

Alison and Diana visited infrequently, and Adam could have sworn he saw Zepp’s face reflected in Alison’s eyes. The nights were uneasy with both men tossing and turning restlessly, dreaming the same sinister dreams. Eventually Lawrence began to talk - of everything but the reason they were there. After that, the time passed quickly.

When the doctor told Adam he could leave, he got dressed reluctantly and signed himself out with impossible slowness. He dropped his name along with his parents phone number on Lawrence’s beside table while the man slept and forced himself to go. Adam will never forget how iniquitous it had felt leaving the other man behind.

+

Alison walked out on Lawrence three weeks after he was discharged from hospital. She was just too afraid to remain living in the same city; in the shadows she saw creeping figures with sardonic intent that she couldn’t ignore. She told him that a lifetimes worth of therapy wouldn’t be enough to erase what she and Diana had been through, but never once did she ask if Lawrence would be okay on his own.

A phone call and less than a fortnight later, Adam and Lawrence had moved into a small central-city apartment together. They fell into a routine almost immediately. Sleepless nights, hazy days: Adam smoking far too many cigarettes and Lawrence opening windows to let in the fresh air, quickly shutting and locking them again compulsively.

Lawrence hardly mentioned Alice or Diana, except when Diana called - because she was beginning to forget what her daddy sounded like. He would tell Adam that he blamed himself for what they went through then he would flip his wallet open, half expecting to see another image of them gagged and bound. Instead he saw an empty photo compartment: which was worse, he couldn’t say.

+

Adam stopped taking photographs after their ordeal. When he finally cleared out his old apartment, Lawrence stood just outside the front doorway gazing in at the dingy kitchen, contemplating the ease of kidnap, wondering how it all went down. Photographs of Lawrence were still pinned to the darkroom walls, soaking in chemicals, hanging from pegs to dry: it took all of Adams strength to take them down and not to turn and run.

When Lawrence finally gathered the courage to enter the apartment he found Adam huddled on the darkroom floor in the red light, clutching the photo he had taken of Lawrence the night of their abduction, whispering apologies into the thick air.

They burned the entirety of Adams photo collection that night in an old terracotta pot, watching the edges curl and blacken, empty satisfaction settling somewhere in Adams chest.

+


The newspaper coverage was enough to lure Jigsaw out of hiding, but in all of their sleepless nights not once was there a flicker of movement, not so much as a dancing shadow outside of their window. More than once Adam wanted the phone to ring, wanted to hear that bitter voice rattle off instructions – he was certain that the game was still on.

When they saw Jigsaws photograph on the front page of the newspaper, three undisturbed months had passed and they knew it was over. Lawrence excused himself and kneeled beside the toilet for an hour, face hovering over the rim in anticipation of the sickness that wouldn’t come.

Adam couldn’t bring himself to read the article, so instead he folded the paper neatly and pushed it into the garbage bin beneath food scraps and soda cans; a proper burial. They spent the rest of the day avoiding each other, the apartment shrouded in silence. Crossing paths in the living room they barely looked at one another for fear of seeing cracked porcelain tiles and dripping rust marks in each others eyes.

+

Everything changed after that.

Lawrence yells at Adam for putting canned food on the wrong shelves in the pantry, and Adam retorts with some pathetic complaint about tripping over crutches. They squabble about the most mundane of things but they manage to laugh about it afterwards; the sound reverberates through the entire apartment for hours. Lawrence expects he’ll need to go back to work eventually, and Adam thinks he might like to go back to university.

Adam still wakes up in the night sometimes with blurred impressions of sunken eyes and paper mache skin lurking just behind his eyelids. His ears echo with the glugging sound of being submerged in foul bath water; he has to remind himself that he’s safe, ignoring the almost-there feeling of metal wrapped around his ankle. Lawrence’s shallow breathing flows over him, and his mind rearranges the shapes from tree shadows on the ceiling until all he can see is his own terrified expression staring back.

“We’re gonna be alright, ‘kay,” the groggy mumble comes from beside him and the patterns on the ceiling vanish. Lawrence shifts and his fingers slide underneath Adams t-shirt: they’re not cold like he always expects, and his body leans into the touch automatically.

When he inhales, Adam imagines that Lawrence smells faintly like blood, but all that was washed away months ago, leaving only the light smell of shampoo and musky cologne.

+

Adam doesn’t think he's in love with Lawrence, but he’s never been this close to anyone before. He supposes the attachment he feels - the absolute need to be close to Lawrence at all times – could be the result of fear. He tries not to analyse it too much because he always finds himself imagining he’s back in the sewer: Lawrence gone and himself alone, empty and completely lost.

Perhaps it is (self)pity that makes Adam slide into bed beside Lawrence at night, wrap his arms around the warm casing that contains so many blessed breaths, so much flowing life, and hold tight until the dawn. Perhaps, in a way, Adam is grateful for what he’s been through, because everything seems more beautiful when you’ve seen so much poison, so much pain. And for the first time in his life Adam isn’t angry, and, when he finally sleeps through the night and wakes up to sunlight and a smile on Lawrence’s face, his heart skips and he thinks maybe there’s some sense to all the madness after all.