A/N: As an avowed Supernatural fan, I must admit that the finale didn't sit right with me. This fic kind of came to me because I really enjoyed Adam's character and I thought he deserved a better ending. Plus I love coming up with backstories for throwaway characters.
Spoiler abound if you haven't seen the fourth/fifth season. Canon is maintained all the way to 5x18, "The Point of No Return". Rating is for sexual references and possible swearing. Brownies for anyone who spots the pop culture references.
Focus doesn't shift to Adam and the Winchesters until the next chapter because I felt like jamming them into the intro was sloppy, but believe you me, this isn't all about "the girl". I tried to keep everything about this chapter brief yet informative. It takes place over the course of a year.
PROLOGUE
Kristen McGee kept having sex dreams about her senior prom date, Adam Milligan.
When they first started, she thought that she was just super horny. It made sense because Kristine Princess Leia McGee was the only person on the Environdale Community College campus who wasn't getting laid. Even 85-year-old Pierce from her Spanish study group was getting some, but Kristen had unrealistically high standards for the men who got to "tap" her.
On the list of influential people in Kristen's life, Adam Milligan didn't rank very high. At the top of the list was her sixth grade math teacher, Mrs. Harris, the only teacher who had ever paid attention to Kristen and assigned her eighth grade level homework because she knew Kristen could do it. Second and third were her parents, followed closely by her aunt Jayma, whose love of Star Wars and intense poker skills had forced Kristen's middle name. Fourth was Noah Crosby, a football player whom Kristen had let cheat off her calculus tests and broke her heart by asking another girl to senior prom. Fifth was Rachel Maddow.
Then again, on that prom night, she had allowed Adam Milligan to slip his fumbling hands inside her pink, tulle dress to become her 'first'.
Then again, it was far from a good experience. They got blood all over his mom's car, the condom broke, and the stress of a possible pregnancy caused a huge fight between them at Kristen's graduation party. She and Adam hadn't spoken since.
Then again, it wasn't like she hated him. As Windom only had one school and McGee and Milligan were next to each other on the attendance list, Kristen and Adam usually sat next to each other or did projects together. Adam had been a comfortable acquaintance her entire life.
Then again, Adam and Kristen were incredibly different people. He met his dad once a year for a baseball game and his mother was always tired because she worked at the only hospital in town. Adam had essentially raised himself. Kristen was the product of an accountant and a finance lawyer, the richest couple in town. They had raised Kristen and her two siblings in a comfortably upper middle class environment.
Then again, Kristen was the only other person in town who had met Adam's dad. Her little brother liked baseball, so she took him to games, and once she'd run into Adam and his dad. The man himself left little impression, but Kristen had always treasured the memory of the normally mellow Adam excited and elated to have his dad visiting.
Perhaps Adam deserved a higher ranking than Noah Crosby.
Kristen had never put much stock in dream psychology. Or rather she tried not to, because the dreams kept occurring, eventually becoming two separate dreams that repeated over and over again.
Dream Number One started in Cate Milligan's car, breath fogging up the window, Adam's thigh pressing between Kristen's legs as she kissed him, both of them overwrought with adolescent lust. It just kind of played on repeat until she woke up.
Dream Number Two started in much the same way, in Cate Milligan's car, but this dream took a drastically different turn. Adam was ripped from the car and Kristen sat helplessly as two shadowy figures ate his intestines.
After Dream Number Two had recurred a few times, Kristen spent less time sleeping and more time studying.
"I see your grades have improved," her father told her over dinner one night.
Her parents actually drove to the little town outside Chicago their daughter now lived in to check up on her. After turning their noses up at the tiny apartment Kristen inhabited, Mr. and Mrs. McGee drove Kristen into Chicago for some safe tourist dining on Navy Pier at the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company.
"I looked online at your finals examinations," Mr. McGee continued in between bites of coconut shrimp. "Straight A's. Not bad for a girl who once faked a stutter to get out of a class presentation."
"Yeah," Kristen replied, distracted, building a cheesy-mashed potato volcano with cocktail sauce lava. Adam was the one who gave her the idea for that particular maneuver and he had even offered to take the blame when her stutter ruse was discovered.
"Things are going so well," Mrs. McGee chirped over a salad. "You look refreshingly thin!"
"Janice Tatum, the girl who writes my English essays, showed me this great whole foods place," Kristen lied. That is, she lied about the whole foods, not about the fact that she hated English courses with every single fiber of her being.
"Oh dear, Kristine," Mrs. McGee coughed as she choked a little on a lettuce leaf. "That could get you in serious trouble!"
"Please. Like either of you have read Finnegan's Wake," Kristen deadpanned. She set down her fork.
"It's your money," Mr. McGee shrugged, continuing to gobble at his plate.
"Kent, aren't you concerned that our daughter is cheating to—"
"Have either of you talked to Cate Milligan lately?" Kristen asked. Her parents froze at exactly the same moment. "I'm just wondering what's up with Adam. Janice and I were thinking about taking a road trip up to Madison in August for the Great Taste of the Midwest beer craft festival. Adam said he was going to school there."
Her parents exchanged glances.
"Haven't you looked him up on Bookface, or whatever that social networking site is called?" Mrs. McGee asked.
"He doesn't have an account," Kristen lied again. Adam actually did have a Facebook account, but Kristen had un-friended all the residents of her hometown when she moved away. "I promise I won't drink," she added hopefully.
"Now that I don't believe for a second," Mr. McGee chuckled, but her mother laid a hand on his arm. Kristen realized that both her parents had a look on their faces, a look usually reserved for funerals or court dates.
"Well…" Mrs. McGee began.
"We didn't know whether or not to tell you," Mr. McGee said, nudging aside his plate so that he could take Kristen's hand.
"It hasn't been that long anyway," Mrs. McGee continued, sipping delicately at her strawberry margarita, something she did when she didn't want to talk.
"What hasn't been that long?" Kristen snapped.
"Cate Milligan is dead," Mr. McGee sighed. "Adam's missing."
Kristen didn't hear a whole lot after that. She realized she'd made a big mistake in deleting the hometown newsletter that popped up in her email every week.
Adam Milligan's disappearance was the talk of the town. He'd come home from school after his mom missed a shift at the hospital and found parts of her stuffed in a ventilation duct beneath her bed. According to his dorm mate, Adam hadn't gone back to school after that, not even to get his stuff. Aside from the cops the last person to talk to him was his ex-girlfriend, Denise Hauer. That had been a few months ago. The only lead on his whereabouts was a meeting he'd had in Cousin Oliver's Diner with two out of town mechanics just before he disappeared.
After her parents had dropped her off and gone to their motel, Kristen dialed Adam's old phone number just to make sure. It was disconnected.
Adam's disappearance didn't alter her life much, except that she started to read the Windom town newsletter. That summer she worked full time as a waitress at the Olympia Diner, the dreams about Adam only coming to her every other week or so. Sometimes he appeared independent of Dream Number One or Two. Sometimes Dream Number One was narrated by lovely, optimistic Mama Cass music. Sometimes Kristen took sleeping pills and didn't remember her dreams.
When school started up again in the fall, she'd had enough of keeping them to herself. She told Janice.
"I met this girl in my Wicca group, she's from Africa, her dad's a shaman," Janice gushed, not even pausing from the correctional note she was writing to her Latin professor on her latest essay. "She was telling me about this dream root they have where you can, like, control your dreams and stuff."
"Can I have some of it?" Kristen asked.
"You'd have to come to gro-o-o-up," Janice taunted her in a sing-song voice, knowing full well that Kristen was an avowed agnostic with intense disdain for anything mystical (the exception being the Force, but only because Aunt Jayma had indoctrinated her with Star Wars at a very early age).
"Fine," Kristen muttered. "I'll be okay as long as our periods don't sync up."
"But then we can buy tampons and chocolate in bulk!"
Janice's Wicca group was surprisingly accepting of Kristen. She never did get the dream root, but the baked goods present at every Wednesday night meeting more than made up for it. There were spells, but they were more holding hands and lighting incense than Charmed. There was New Age empowerment crap, but it sounded less pretentious coming from Mandisa, the South African girl who led the group and still bore the scars of apartheid. Their parties were awesome and the anti-Thanksgiving celebration was the best ritual sacrifice with pie that Kristen had ever attended.
Only a few hardcore members seemed to believe they could perform "magic", but they never brought baked goods, so Kristen didn't pay any attention to them. That was until Janice started getting just as hardcore. It only became an issue when Janice got evicted and had to move in with Kristen.
"Am I seriously carrying a box of magical herbs?" Kristen asked between gritted teeth, climbing the fire escape to her apartment, hanging onto the freezing metal with one hand while the box was squeezed precariously under her arm.
"That's acacia leaf!" Janice scolded, her own arms stuffed with a bag of Celtic deity figures and a hamper full of clothes. She stopped to un-jam the window to Kristen's apartment. "They're burned on charcoal to develop—"
"No burning! You're not getting me evicted!" Kristen scolded.
"You're okay with cow's blood right?" Janice asked nonchalantly, stepping into Kristen's apartment and taking the box from Kristen's sore arms. Kristen stood on the fire escape for a few moments, catching her breath and processing the request.
"Seriously, cow's blood?" she asked after a moment.
"I won't leave it out or anything," Janice insisted. She dropped her stuff on the hideaway bed Kristen had prepared and plopped down, rolling around on thin, springy mattress. "It's secured in a manner much kinder than the slaughter of every bacon cheeseburger you eat."
The wind howled, blowing Kristen's red scarf into her face. As she was untangling it and spitting out her own hair, Janice came back to the window.
"I'm not gonna bite off your ear in your sleep, McG," she insisted. "It's the times we live in. Apocalypse is approaching and whatnot."
"I didn't know you were Mayan," Kristen teased. The two girls shared a giggle. "Guess it's not any creepier than Scientology or Catholicism," she relented.
"Come inside," Janice urged, skipping over to unpack her things. "You'll get frostbite."
Kristen hesitated, but only for a second. Janice was her best friend. Friends accept each other's quirks.
That night, Dream Number One recurred, in Dolby Digital Surround Sound. Kristen woke up cold, sweaty and gasping. Janice teased her about it for a week and told the entire Wicca group about it, leaving out the Adam aspect. The group declared Kristen the Gabrielle to Janice's Xena.
Dream Number Two recurred about a month later, but this time the ending changed. When Adam was ripped from the car, it wasn't by two shadowy figures; it was by a large strong man whom Kristen could barely see. He was completely concealed by the blinding white light that accompanied his entrance.
When Kristen woke up, she got a call from her mother. Aunt Jayma was dead and Kristen needed to come home for the funeral.