chief insquisitor

      The woman sitting on a park bench seemed familiar, somehow. Not in the sense that he'd ever met her, or seen her, just familiar. Like whenever he was near a certain bookshop in Soho, almost. Something about her reminded him of someone.

      Adam hadn't ever wanted to get back into anything involving not so natural creatures. Beings. People? People. But he could hardly be blamed for being too curious for his own good - and besides, he thought, he was morally obligated to go and ask this man why he was in someone else's body.

       For the first time in a while, Adam was sitting at home. There weren't any classes, nor anything to do - Dog was in the garden, pointedly not escaping, and he was writing a draft that he'd titled, 'What to do when you find you that your biological father is Satan.'

       Most of his books, when sold, tended to be construed as comedy. It was almost funny how other people found it funny, if that made any sense at all. At least him being the antichrist made people laugh. Besides, if he ever, in the distant future, got a brother or sister or something to restart the apocalypse, he could give it to them.

       If he was still alive, of course. He wasn't sure how long he'd last, really. He wasn't sure if he wanted to be immortal or not. Earth wouldn't get boring, but living might. Again, if that made any sense.

      For the most part, he'd been minding his own business for the past week. Classes, going home, stopping Dog from chasing cats into the middle of the road, normal things. Nothing much had happened, really. He was starting to get slightly bored.

      And hence he'd decided to cure that boredom. Admittedly, he didn't really have a way to do so, but he could find one. Currently he was wandering around, trying in vain to find something to do. There wasn't really anybody around. It was boring, he thought, for the tenth time in what seemed like a minute.

      And there it was again. Being eleven at the time, Adam didn't remember many of the exact details of the notpocalypse - or perhaps, being the antichrist, he did. Either way, he didn't think back to it much. Being the son of Lucifer wasn't something you wanted to think about on a daily basis, anyway.

      But he couldn't ignore the feeling. It was familiar - the same sense he'd gotten when Aziraphale & Madame Tracy had come near him. When they were in the same body, anyway. Eyes flicking around, pointlessly looking for the source of it, his eyes soon landed on a man standing some way away.

      Adam had never really thought much about the almostpocalypse after it was over. He was eleven, and while at first he had, thinking of it as a sort of adventure - the serious kind of adventure - he'd stopped thinking of it so often when he grew up.

      It wasn't that he was traumatized by it, much - nothing had gone wrong, really - it was just that he didn't want to accidentally end up making the voices come back. They hadn't been the nicest experience. Especially not when they'd nearly made him mind control his best friends and end the world.

      There wasn't any reason why he was thinking of it today. It was just one of those days, he supposed. Dog was not so easily subdued - the terrier shaped hellhound was bouncing at his feet, having managed to chase a cat without getting hit on the nose by it earlier that day.

      Speeding up slightly to keep up with him, Adam grinned, pushing all thoughts of falsealarmageddon from his mind and following Dog down the street. Perhaps he should have been looking where he was going, because, being preoccupied as he was with watching Dog in front of him, he didn't see the man walking in the opposite direction. And hence, didn't manage to stop himself quite literally bumping into him.

      Benches in America were stranger than benches in England, he decided. There wasn't a noticeable difference, they were just different. Or maybe it was simply his subconscious, because America was quite different from England. As different as Western countries got from each other, anyway.

      Everything was different. Especially Dog, who'd been looking around in an incredibly unhappy way for a hellhound for the last ten minutes. Adam hadn't been able to really see anything wrong, but there was probably something. Unless, of course, he'd simply smelt a cat or something similar.

      The whining coming from the terrier shaped being finally got to him five minutes later, and he stood up with a roll of his eyes, giving Dog a vaguely fond look. "C'mon, then." He turned, starting to walk off before his downcast gaze fell on a pair of shoes and he looked up into almost startingly blue eyes.

      There wasn't yet another apocalypse, was there?

      At least, that was Adam's first thought upon noticing a rather familiar figure near him. He wasn't sure he could stop another apocalypse. It had been hard enough to not somehow give into the voices telling him what to do last time. All his involvement would do was put the world in more danger.

      But then, maybe he was jumping to conclusions. It was a horribly boring phrase, one that he'd hated whenever used against him in his childhood, but now he supposed it was the lesser of two evils. Maybe he should ask her, anyway.