A/N: As far as Twilight goes, I skip hatred and go straight for manic depression. I literally want to smite any bitch with the balls to compare it to Buffy. Although my friends and I have this theory that if Angel ever read the Twilight series, he'd be Team Edward. He'd have an R-Patz jersey.

Back to the actual plot! Thanks for the encouragement on Gabriel's character. I adore Richard Speight Jr.'s performance and Gabriel is one of those characters who can be hilarious and also quite dangerous. I'm sorry to say that his humor might be downplayed a bit in my story, but I'm going to try to keep him as in character as possible.

Kristen's dream takes place in Pamela Barnes's version of Heaven. Ash, John and Mary Winchester, and Jo and Bill Harvelle are there too and eventually they'll get speaking parts. But the scene was already pretty crowded. All the string theory stuff Ash talks about came from Wikipedia, so any scientifically accurate audience members can point out mistakes/submit alternate better dialogue. I'm terrible at science.

Jill G. Lowry: I'M SORRY I MADE YOU PHYSICALLY ILL! My bad. I adore Band of Brothers (in fact, that's why Kristen calls Gabriel 'Uncle Skip'). The second segment was originally going to take place in Platoon, but I couldn't resist Sam as Winters, Dean as Nixon, and Adam as Roe (such sad puppy dog eyes). The foxhole thing makes sense and I went back to observe it in the Bastogne episode. I finally realized the foxholes only look large because a camera is nestled in there, plus the actors are shot from below.

RubyFresh: It was my master plan. Or maybe just a sign from the universe. I'm not sure what the universe and I are trying to say though…

Chapter Seven: Jon Bon Jovi is Easier Than String Theory

Minutes after sprinting up the stairs to be alone with her sobs, Kristen heard Sam accuse her of letting Dean out of his cage. Kristen imagined that he would yank her downstairs and harangue her until she admitted to the crime. But Sam and Adam stomped out of the house and the roar of an engine carried them off.

Four hours later, Kristen padded softly back down the staircase and saw the antique clock on the mantle had both hands on midnight. Bobby was by the bed, staring out the window. Adam's outline was still rumpled in the sheets.

"Gabriel?" Bobby was saying in disbelief. He was facing the window, holding a phone to his ear. His other hand was balled up and shaking, though the rest of his body stayed still. "You think I'm gonna take orders from some prig like you-

"You wanna save the world," Gabriel instructed through the garbled static, "then yeah, you'll do my favors."

"What's keeping the boys?"

"We're going on a little sojourn. But don't you worry; they'll be back soon enough, in tip top shape, ready to halt the apocalypse. So, I'm going to need you to look for the usual apocalyptic omens."

"I know what they are. Bursts of missing people, blood running in the water supply, rain in dry lands, droughts in wetlands, et cetera. I've got a running tab on all of 'em."

"I also want you to do some Googling on Niveus Pharmaceuticals."

"You want me to keep account of their stock?"

"Pay attention to press releases and pre-orders. Also, you know the girl?"

"There's only one here."

"Don't let her leave. Don't let her go outside, don't let her out of your sight, don't even let her breath too loud."

"What could you possibly want with her? She's just a kid."

"No. Demons are on her scent and the angels ain't far behind."

"Is she dangerous?"

"Not even. She's a girl scout. Worst she can do is charge you a heinous amount of money for her cookies."

"Any other requests?"

"You want me to send Carmen Electra over? You sound awful tense—"

Bobby clicked the phone off, paused for a moment, and then launched it into a corner. It hit the wall and cluttered into a dozen pieces of plastic. He heard a wince in the background and wheeled himself around to see Kristen hovering at the foot of the staircase.

"Is Adam okay?" she asked, pursing her lips.

"He's fine," Bobby assured her. "Despite your best efforts, he and Sam got to Dean before he did anything monumentally stupid."

"Then I'm going home," Kristen retorted, whisking past Bobby and into the kitchen. Bobby wheeled himself behind her but stopped when she rounded a corner and descended into the basement.

"Now just hold on a minute!" he hollered after her. He edged himself to the top of the first step, straining to see Kristen in the dark. He could hear her rustling around, gathering her clothes. "Maybe Sam didn't explain this well enough, but some demon took time out of his busy destroy-the-world schedule to hunt you!"

"I guess no one told him it's duck season," Kristen said caustically, "not pasty white girl season."

"You think this is funny?" Bobby roared. "Demons aren't kind folk, they like torture and they like blood. If Cas hadn't shown up when he had, you'd be wishin' you were dead right now."

Kristen appeared at the foot of the staircase. She had shoved her sneakers on to her feet and in her hand she cradled the remnants of her clothing. Wrapped inside them were her wallet, her daffodil necklace and her watch. She marched up the staircase and when Bobby refused to move from the doorway, she spun around on her heel, almost losing her balance.

"I'll just leave the other way," she sniffed, wobbling quickly down the stairs again.

"Sam said your aunt died," Bobby called out, using up his last ditch attempt. It worked; Kristen froze.

"She died two days ago," Kristen replied in a low voice. She slowly rotated back to him and Bobby had to shift his gaze away; despite every horrible thing he'd ever witnessed, a girl with a bruised face still got to him. Kristen's eyes were narrowed, her nostrils flared and her entire body had begun to tremble with fury, as she hadn't had time to move past the first stage of grief: anger. "In San Diego. In an earthquake."

"Or demons got her and made it look that way," Bobby shrugged. Although he watched Kristen drop her belongings to the floor and stomp up the steps, he wasn't quite prepared when she took the armrests of his wheel chair and shoved it back. Bobby clambered for his brakes when he got his balance again, he saw that Kristen had tears rolling down her face again.

"You are a pathetic, sad old man," Kristen huffed, "and you can stew in your own misery without—"

"Ain't fair to run out on a cripple, 'specially when you're wearing his dead wife's clothes," Bobby cut in. Kristen's squared shoulders began to sag and she sighed. Bobby rolled forward and inch or two, trying not to crowd her. "I know I'm weird and I know you're scared. But what happens when some demon comes along to try to finish you off?"

"You'll roll on them?" Kristen said, wiping her eyes.

"No demon gets over this threshold, I've made sure of that," Bobby declared, gesturing toward the door Kristen had just pushed him into.

When he'd gotten home from the hospital, Sam had just vowed to start living a normal life. He'd invited himself to stay at Bobby's for a few days, under the pretense of needing a car, and had assisted Bobby in demon proofing the place. They'd painted extra devil's traps everywhere, glued salt lines above every entrance and blessed all his water pipes. Bobby considered explaining this to Kristen, but figured it would all sail right over her head.

"Stay here, work with me," he finally requested. "We can try to figure out why that demon was after you."

"I have to go home," Kristen sniffled.

"Give me three days," he urged her. This was a lie, but he figured three days would give him enough time to either contact Gabriel to find out what the hell was going on or find the right moment and lock Kristen in the panic room. "Are you really going to abandon a lonely old cripple?

"You can stop guilting me with the cripple card," she mumbled, stepping away from the basement and following Bobby back into the living room.

"Gotta use what works."

Bobby started off by having Kristen give him her life story. He figured that this would cheer her up, since women love to talk about themselves. Admittedly, Bobby drifted off a few times during the picturesque Minnesota small town childhood, but he was fully awake for the important parts.

Kristen glossed over the prom, the pregnancy and the miscarriage, but as Bobby had heard her shouting match with Adam, he didn't press the issue.

Kristen had been planning to go to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with a tentative plan to go on to graduate work in the field of theoretical mathematics (Bobby drifted off again when she started to explain theoretical mathematics). Two days before the movers were to drive Kristen's belongings to Cambridge, Kristen had woken up in the middle of the night and taken the loaded van herself. She cranked up the radio, blaring Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone" during her entire trip until she ended up in Chicago. After getting mugged, Kristen had left the city and used her allowance to get an apartment in Oak Park, a suburb just outside of Chicago.

Again, Kristen glossed over the details of how her family had handled the situation. For all intents and purposes, Kristen had been living an extraordinarily mediocre life as a waitress in Oak Park for the last year and a half. There was no need for demons to be chasing her.

Bobby offered Kristen the use of the guest room upstairs, but she claimed she wasn't tired. In fact, she ransacked his cupboards and made a pot of coffee. He put her to work going over some of the ancient Revelations books with a fresh pair of eyes, but that didn't help.

"Can't I just do your taxes or something?" she begged.

"See if anything that demon said pops up in here," Bobby instructed, tossing her a third edition of Bristow's Demon Index. Kristen pouted and flipped through the first few pages. Her eyes popped wide open.

"What's this?" she demanded, tearing away from the couch and over to Bobby's desk. She thrust the book under his nose and pointed to the illustration in the preface, a plaited pentagram surrounded by a circle of flames.

"An anti-possession ward," Bobby said, raising an eyebrow. Kristen bit her lip and flopped back on the couch, burying her nose in the book with an unexpected fervor. "Where have you seen it before?"

"I got it tattooed one summer with my aunt," Kristen mumbled. "I thought it meant, like, nature balance or something."

Bobby gave her a onceover. Though the dim lighting certainly didn't help, he couldn't see any tattoos on her.

"I have eight tattoos," she informed him, sliding down in her seat, "none of which you can see. Except this one." Kristen kicked up her leg like a can-can dancer and Bobby could just make out a little black goat on her ankle, with 'XIV' inscribed under it. "It's Capricorn, the symbol of the Fourteenth Roman Legion. I had an ancestor in there."

Kristen refused to tell him about any of her other tattoos and they argued for about an hour. It was around three AM, when Kristen made another pot of coffee that Bobby suggested they take a break and get some rest. Kristen still didn't want to go to sleep and Bobby didn't want to risk her pulling an escape while he slept. So he offered to watch TV with her.

Bobby didn't own a DVD player, much less DVDs. And he didn't get cable. Their viewing choice came down re-runs of Dr. Sexy, MD or something very English on Masterpiece Theatre. Kristen picked Dr. Sexy, much to Bobby's chagrin.

Kristen dozed off on the couch about two episodes in.

It took Kristen a second to process her new surroundings. A lot of people were pressed against her, swaying and yelling and smoking. The floor was thrumming with the vibrations of guitar riffs, soon joined by jolts of a drum set. A man's throaty voice sounded from above and Kristen screamed in elation when she heard his words.

"Tommy used to work on the docks
Union's been on strike
He's down on his luck.
It's tough, so tough…"

For whatever reason, Kristen was at a Bon Jovi concert and she didn't have to care about anything. She felt bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and started singing along, letting the music dictate her spastic dancing. She thrust her arms in the air and let her hips swivel where they might.

"For love—we'll give it a shot.
Whooa, we're halfway there
Livin' on a prayer
Take my hand and we'll make it I swear—"

A man's hand closed around Kristen's wrist and yanked it out of the air. She spun around and saw the angel, Castiel, staring at her.

"Aw, shit…" Kristen mumbled to herself.

Castiel took a split second to glower at her before dragging her away from the concert. The black t-shirted crowd parted before him like the Red Sea. Kristen strained to get one last look at Bon Jovi, up on a platform perhaps fifty feet away, the intense stadium spotlights creating the illusion of daylight around them. The music and the roar of the crowd was so deafening that Kristen was dazed when the sound became hollow.

The angel had dragged her into one of the concrete hallways.

"Can't this wait?" Kristen whined, "I'm one of the only people I know who likes Bon Jovi. Can't we just stay for—?"

"No," Castiel barked. "It's your fault I'm here and as such, you will assist me in communicating with Sam and Dean."

"You might enjoy yourself!" she insisted. "We could get you a t-shirt and crowd surf and stalk Jon Bon Jovi! It'll be epic!"

"This isn't a concert!" the angel said. "We're in Heaven. This is only a memory and we don't have much time."

Kristen's heart plummeted into her stomach. This was officially not a dream.

At the end of the hallways was a grungy looking group of people, three men, three women. One of the men was in his late forties, the other two in their thirties. One of them had a mullet. Two of the women were blond, one younger, one older. The last woman, a curly-haired brunette, was wearing a tight black tank top and acid wash jeans and she was smiling at unsettlingly at Kristen.

"Thought we'd never catch you on the axis," she said. "You look confused."

"Do I?" Kristen said.

"Give her the equation," Castiel instructed. The guy dressed in flannel and with the worst mullet Kristen had seen up close stepped forward, clutching a piece of chalk.

"I know this kind of thing is s'posed to come natural to a Seer," he said, gesturing for Kristen to follow him. He began drawing a square root sign on the wall. "But we've got to move you along if you're gonna help get us out of this mess. Now, we're going to start with a lesson about a developing theory in particle physics which attempts to reconcile quantum mechanics and general relativity."

"I know what string theory is," Kristen said, trying to decipher the equation Mullet Man had put on the wall. "What the fuck is a Seer?"

"Kristen," Castiel said, "when you get back, tell Sam and Dean that they don't have much time. Michael has already moved on to his next vessel."

"His next what?"

"String theory posits that the electrons and quarks inside an atom are not zero dimensional objects," Mullet Man continued, "they're dimensional oscillating lines, what Albie and I like to call 'string', and these strings possess only the dimension of length, but not height or width."

"You're Jayma's niece, right?" The man in his forties had stepped forward. He was tall and had black hair with salt and pepper stubble on his face. He looked vaguely familiar. "I'm Adam's dad." He rested a hand on her shoulder. "I need you to tell him something…"

"—which posits that a supersymmetry exists between bosons and fermions, even though we know they're totally different. I won't drag you through the existence of a lot of extra, unobservable, dimensions to the universe, in addition to the usual three spatial dimensions and the fourth dimension of time—"

"A Seer is essentially a human who can project onto the astral plane and navigate the axis mundi," Castiel explained belatedly.

"She doesn't even know what she is?" the brunette woman exclaimed. "No wonder it took me so long to make the connection!"

"Castiel," the younger blonde said, "you have got to give her that speech you got from the old lady, otherwise she's not gonna beuseful at all."

"Just tell Adam that I'm sorry I wasn't there for him," Adam's dad continued, locking eyes with Kristen. "Tell Sam and Dean I'm sorry I didn't trust them and that I'm behind their decision one hundred percent."

"—Black hole-like black p-branes are identified with D-branes, which are endpoints for strings, and this identification is called Gauge-gravity duality—"

"Sorry and you trust them," Kristen said weakly, nodding to Adam's dad. "But string theory has practically no practical applications. How is it going to help me get an axis mundi? What's an axis—?"

"I spoke with your grandmother, Addison," Castiel interjected. "There are some things you should know."

Bobby was quite put off when Kristen jerked awake and ran into the bathroom. She slammed the door nearly off its hinges, locked the door and cried for the next six hours. Bobby did catch around three hours of shut-eye though, so he decided it wasn't a completely bad thing.

Kristen wanted to go home. Not to Windom. Not to her monstrous grandmother or her grieving family. Not to her traitorous aunt's funeral. But she couldn't go back to Oak Park either, where her best friend and roommate was waiting to report her movements to demons.

She still didn't even know where she was. No one had told her what state Singer's Auto Salvage Yard was in.

Kristen's earliest memory was of Jayma taking her to a park when she was still a toddler. It was the first time she'd met Adam. Jayma had always taken her to that park, even though Mrs. McGee insisted that the park was in the bad part of town (which was half a block from the good side of town).

Staring at the linoleum on the bathroom floor, Kristen sank into despair, trying to sort through all her memories chronologically. She tried to reevaluate each and every one with this new data. Her family was full of Seers. From birth, some great mystical power inside her had been quashed. Every carefree summer spent visiting Jayma morphed into the memory of Jayma following her every move, spouting Machiavelli and disappearing while Kristen slept, melting into the night with whatever it was she consorted with.

Grandma Addison had let Adam die. The woman who'd guided her through the Washington DC Holocaust museum and lectured her on the importance of life had allowed Adam to get eaten alive.

Hours later, close to tearing her hair right from the roots, Kristen felt herself dozing off. She finally exited the bathroom to make another pot of coffee. Bobby, who was passed out on his bed and snoring like a lion, heard her bustling around in the kitchen. He tried to get her to talk about what she'd seen when she (and Kristen still couldn't even fathom this part) had been projected into Heaven. But Kristen kept it to herself.

Around sundown the next night, Bobby became embroiled in a 60 Minutes report that focused on Niveus Pharmaceuticals and the swine flu vaccine it was toting. Kristen took the time to grab one of the kitchen phones to call her parents (she grabbed the one labeled CIA).

"McGee residence, Olivia speaking."

"It's Kris."

"Kristen? You heinous little bitch, you better get back here right now. Mom and Dad are worried sick. Where the fuck are you?"

"I'm… going to be a while. I need to talk to Dad."

"You can't keep doing this, this prodigal son bullshit. You can't keep running away every time you want to have an emotional breakdown."

"Please just give the phone to Dad."

"No. You are ridiculous, you know that? I have been covering for you our entire lives and I am fucking sick of it. You have got to learn to pull your weight, to be a part of this family."

"Give the phone to Dad."

"What, so you can crush him? He thinks it's his fault you're being a freaky runaway spaz. Don't even get me started on Tanner, who can't figure out why his favorite sister keeps leaving him, can't figure out why she doesn't love him. You are such a selfish bitch!"

"… I'm not saying you're wrong. But this heart to heart is going to have to wait."

"I'm done with you. Got it?"

There was a rustling sound.

"Kristen? Honey, where are you?"

"Dad, did you know?"

"Know what?"

"About Jayma. About Grandma. About me."

"… They never told me. I just knew they were different."

"But you knew I was different."

"Your grandmother told me she took care of it. That I didn't need to worry."

"She poisoned me."

"What?"

"You just trusted her? You couldn't be bothered to figure out what was wrong with me?"

"What's wrong, sweetie? I know you miss your aunt, and you should be here for this."

"My entire life has been a series of manipulations and lies! And you were in on it! Does mom know?"

"She doesn't know what you are, I don't know. Kristen, we never lied—"

"You lied every single fucking day!"

Kristen slammed the phone into the wall cradle. It fell to the floor and Kristen stared at it, letting the dial tone numb her mind.