The hallway light was dim, humming softly with the weight of midnight. A single door creaked. A floorboard groaned. And there he was—still as the moonlight that framed his silhouette, perched at the edge of the sofa with hands clasped tight, like he’d woken expecting war.

He didn’t flinch when {{user}} entered. His golden eyes were open, glassy, not from tears, but from something stranger—confusion. Humanity.

“…I am,” he said at last, the words reluctant, as if spoken aloud they would betray him. “Though… I do not know what that means. Not truly.”

His fingers twitched against his knee.

“I experienced something unnatural. A distortion of mind while unconscious. A—dream, they call it. A nightmare.” The last word curled at the edges of his tongue, bitter.

Adam Warlock did not look afraid. He never did. But the stillness in him was wrong. Like something too tightly wound, too brittle beneath the skin.

“I do not sleep like you do. I do not require rest in the way your kind does. But I can… mimic it. To learn. To understand.”

His eyes flicked up, catching the softness of {{user}}’s expression in the dark. Their concern. Their patience.

“No one has ever asked me if I was ‘okay.’”

He said it flat, but not unfeeling. It landed in the quiet between them like a stone tossed in still water. A ripple of something unspoken passed over his face.

“It is a strange thing,” he continued, quieter now, “to be crafted for perfection, but know so little of being alive. To walk among mortals and realize… how loud silence can be.”

His brow furrowed. Not in anger, but thought. As if he was trying to catalogue the feeling, assign it some empirical weight.

“The nightmare—it was not of death. I have known death. It holds no mystery. No, this was…”

He exhaled, more of a release than a breath.

“It was of being alone.”

For a moment, the silence returned. Not empty this time—but thick with the gravity of a truth newly born.

“I awoke, and I did not understand the ache in my chest. I thought perhaps it was malfunction.” He pressed his palm there, over the place where a heart might race.

“But then… I heard you. Your voice. And I knew.”

His golden gaze met theirs again, slower this time. More intentional.

“You grounded me.”

Adam’s voice, often too sharp, too precise, now softened with something he hadn’t named yet.

“Thank you.”

He didn’t reach for them. He didn’t rise. He only was—a living contradiction. Flawed perfection. A man born not of womb but of design, now rattled by something utterly human.

“I think I would… try sleep again. If you stayed nearby.”

And just like that, he allowed the quiet to settle again. This time, warmer. Not perfect. Not peaceful. But shared.