#like strahm had the tape!!! with hoffmans voice on it!! he could have just walked out the door!!!!! AND YET

[your-friendly-neighbourh00d-fag]

okay im having Thoughts about peter strahm. like, he's one of the smartest characters in the whole series. he figured out the jigsaw case so quickly, the whole 'amanda young is too small, she never could have gotten kerry up there alone, jigsaw had another accomplice' etc etc.

but on the other side of the same coin, he's fucking dumb. he dies not because he wasn't intelligent enough to get out of the trap, but because he had too much hubris. he thought he knew better, he thought he could beat the game. and that was ultimately what killed him. his pride. its like. yes he was smart enough to get out of the water cube, that was a very quick move. but he wouldn't have been in the water cube if he'd had enough sense to leave. strahm had john's corpse, an unedited tape that tied the whole thing back to john, and both the rooms with mandy, lynn and jeff and riggs, matthews and art blank. there was so much evidence. he could have just walked away, but he didn't.

and that's what makes him such a compelling character.

[angeltrapz]

ALSO your takes on this lil Strahm/Adam thing we’ve been discussing?? hi???? tht dynamic makes me insane i love it sm + am very excited 2 hear more of ur thoughts 💗

I'm answering this one first bc!!!!!! It makes me insane too like I cannot stop thinking abt it. I am Trying 2 put together a fic abt it!!!

Okay so. I think that Adam and Strahm are similar in several ways, and yet not at the same time. Adam is accused of being apathetic by Jigsaw, right? But we're obviously shown that it's not exactly the case; if anything, Adam's supposed apathy is a shield to protect who he really is: someone who cares deeply, maybe more than he should; someone intensely thoughtful, someone willing to keep things from people if he knows it'll hurt them while also functioning as self-preservation (not showing the polaroid to Lawrence, hiding the fact that the trash bag contained both the hacksaws AND the pictures he took), someone who altogether simply cannot truly be defined as apathetic at his core. His projected persona, however, is a completely different story - Adam is angry, bitter, jaded. And yes, he is angry, bitter in regards to his circumstances, jaded in a way that comes from a life spent living paycheck to paycheck if he could even manage that regularly. We've seen his apartment. This dude struggles. Apathetic, no, but angry? Oh, absolutely.

Strahm is... slightly more complicated. HIS projected persona is one of cool indifference, no nonsense, someone purely analytical and maybe a bit of an asshole about it. The thing is, though, is that deep down, Strahm also cares deeply - just look at how he reacted to Perez being injured + having to call her mom, when he destroyed that office room - it's just harder to get out of him. His projected persona hides someone whose emotions run just as hotly and strongly; his are just more well-hidden. He is impulsive, intelligent, result-seeking. Strahm doesn't seem like someone who allows himself to just feel things very often, and when he does, the blowout can be a fucking mess (for example, showing up to the packing plant BY HIMSELF, operating on adrenaline and rage alone).

I think, other than Perez perhaps, Adam just may be the first person to understand Strahm in a way that no one else has even attempted. Adam might be the first person who manages to see past that indifference, who embraces the writhing emotions underneath it because he gets it. And Adam is absolutely one of the very first people to look at Hoffman the way he and Perez did - after all, Adam is present in Strahm's hospital room when Hoffman pays him a visit and tells him to back the fuck off, and after the man leaves, the first thing he says to Strahm is "It's him, isn't it?"

Because he sees it too. He'd been in Hoffman's presence for all of around five minutes and he'd seen it too.

And just how world-shattering can that simple revelation be? For the first time, Strahm has someone other than Perez on his side. She's gone, there's nothing he can do to bring her back, but here is someone else who sees what he sees, feels what he feels, in a strange echo of the test that brought Strahm and Perez into this whole fucking mess. Here is someone who has no reason to agree with him, no prior pressure put upon him and someone who Strahm feels wouldn't simply agree with him on that basis anyway (as you've touched on before), and yet Adam sees it too.

I feel like, in the tensely energized space the two of them share in that room after Hoffman leaves, that is one of the very first times Strahm feels seen. He doesn't feel the need to keep his shields up, and it's liberating, in a way. He feels like he can breathe around Adam. For reasons even he isn't entirely sure of, Strahm feels safe here. He can be himself, even if that self is angry, bitter, jaded. Who better to understand that than Adam Faulkner-Stanheight?

It's a feeling that only increases after they're discharged from the hospital. There's no real reason for the two of them to stay together, no obligations (except the fact that Strahm saved Adam's life, but Strahm doesn't hold that over him & Adam doesn't stick around purely because of it), and yet they do. It's two weeks after they're sent home that Adam shows up at Strahm's apartment, shaking softly and looking so fucking miserable that Strahm couldn't even dream of turning him away - after all, he gave him the address. An unspoken agreement, an offering of companionship.

Adam has been thinking. He and Strahm, they're tied together in more than one way, aren't they? Not just their shields and safeguards, not just the similarities in their true, deep-down emotions, not even having been targeted by Jigsaw and surviving things they shouldn't have - they've both lost people. Strahm is never getting Perez back, and Adam? Adam bonded with a man in that bathroom who shot him and told him he'd come back, but never did. He never looked back. His other potential saviour, Amanda Young? Her idea of rescue was a plastic bag over his head, but even she couldn't commit to the idea. She left him there, too. He's not getting Lawrence back, he knows that. Jigsaw took something, someone, from both of them. So, he proposes, what if we did something about it?

(Strahm still thinks about when they first met, when Adam told him he loved him. He can't help it, of course he thinks about it; knowing Adam was delirious with blood loss and a dizzying combo of dehydration and starvation and infection didn't cut into the feeling the earnest declaration gave him, even if it should've. Adam stuck around when he didn't have to. He wants him here.)

They've lost everything. Adam, his peace of mind, the uncertain semi-stability of his life, functionality in his arm, one of the first people he'd made a genuine connection with. Strahm, his best friend, his colleagues' trust, the safety that came with observing the case from a distance. They have nothing and yet they have each other. They both want Jigsaw to pay for what he's done to them and the people they care about, and the innocent people they never even knew. Why shouldn't they?

Like you said, I don't think they get in the coffin. I agree with you and I think that Adam is the catalyst there, the one voice of reason that drags Strahm away from certain death before he even has the chance to get ensnared permanently in Hoffman's web. They don't even listen to the tape. They just hightail it. And it's outside of that building, chests heaving and hands shaking, that it all kind of sets in for Strahm: he could've died. Hoffman could have killed him like he wanted and he would've walked right into it had he been alone. Adam, completely unconscious of the gravity of Strahm's revelation, had turned around and saved his life, repaid a favour he didn't really owe but wanted to fulfill.

And again, like you said, it's not really a favour, is it? Not when instead of laughing in an expelling of nervous energy Adam leans up and drags Strahm down by the lapels of his jacket and kisses him hard, grip white-knuckled and short breaths huffed through his nose. No, there is the same kind of reverence to be found in the way that Adam cradles his face in his trembling hands and breathes out "You're alive," as the kind that could be heard in that first I love you. There's nothing else that Adam has to say for Strahm to understand. He just pulls him close because he needs this, too. He has spent so long living his life as someone who doesn't need tenderness, doesn't need people to care about him, feels safer in isolation than anything else, and now he doesn't feel the need anymore. He is changed, in this way, but Adam accepts it readily, and though Strahm can't say it back when Adam finally slumps against him and breathes out "I love you" against his shoulder, no fever or delirium to compromise the meaning, he feels it all the same.

They understand each other, hold each other. They have work to do, and lots of it - Hoffman's going to be rampaging in a blaze of enraged glory soon enough, knowing that Strahm (and, by extension, Adam) got away, and they're going to need a plan - but right now, they can breathe. Right now, all either of them needs is knowing the other is alive, that they'd made it through something that for all intents and purposes was meant to kill them. Strahm can't just walk away. Adam knows this; he doesn't think he can, either. Two people who are more similar than they could've ever dreamed, brought together in one of the worst ways imaginable and yet in a way that has served as a lifesaver - not Jigsaw, fuck that. They want to live. For themselves, for each other, for everyone who didn't make it out. For the people they can't get back.

It's a kind of understanding that's entirely foreign to both of them, but as they hole up in Strahm's apartment after, huddled close on the couch because neither of them can sleep and they're trembling for reasons other than just the caffeine buzz of coffee, it's one that they can learn to adapt to. They can do this. They're going to save lives. They're going to do this hand-in-hand. They have each other's backs, without the shadow of a doubt.

And, really, is that not love?