Adam Monroe

[ooc: AU piece based on a "what if" about what might have happened to Adam in "Five Years Gone."]

I believed that it would be better, after. The world was supposed to change, you see, but not like this. They don't know, at least, who I am. Not anymore. She saw to that, sweeping in triumphant and pulling me out of that place, out of the darkness of a cold, cheerless cell, just when everything seemed darkest. Kaito turned, trained my carp well, but she and Daniel won, and with their triumph came the shift in power that sent Kaito falling, his orders nothing but dust. Without Arthur to object, with Charles dead, with Kaito broken, with Bob nothing but their peon again, there was no one to stop her from walking through the door, face alight with triumph and a trembling glee.

"It's done..." she whispered against my lips, an instant before my hand was ready to tighten around her throat for her betrayal.

"The virus?" I didn't want to ask. I shouldn't have paused to ask, to let her kiss me that way, the traitorous bitch, but the words pulled out of me anyway.

"No," she said, voice a bit sharp. "Don't be ridiculous. We'd have been in here with you if we'd done that..."

"Then what?" It occurred to me, of course, that snapping at her wasn't the best way to get out that tantalizingly open door, but after thirty years of the torture and sadism of my friends, I thought I had a right to be a bit cranky.

"If you're going to be like that..." She tried to pull back. I didn't allow it. She was not going out that door without me while I was still breathing.

"A bomb," she said, her eyes glittering strangely. "A person, really, able to go nuclear, able to blow up, and then heal, and he did. In New York. The city is gone, destroyed."

I'd heard the murmurs, the screams, the panic in the halls a few days before, but I thought perhaps someone else had managed an escape I never had. Nothing like this. Bob had been pale, and Elle silent, but no one would tell me. Now I knew why. There was something brittle to her glee, a darker something she wasn't telling me, but the excitement washed over me in response, and I felt my breath catch.

"And now?" I asked, letting my fingers trace skin I remembered too well, finding the places age had changed her by touch, but watching her eyes, that were the same.

"Now I think it's time we get you out of here, Adam," a voice I knew said from the door, and Daniel was there, the same light glittering in his eyes. "It's time for the healing to start, and we need you for that."

( I wanted to kill them both, for turning, but they were like children presenting me with some shiny present as if that made up for every bad thing they'd ever done.  )

April 1963

He waited, leaning up against his brand new red Plymouth Sport Fury convertible. Boys walked by, eyeing the car with envious eyes. The girls smiled invitingly, and he let his eyes slide down over their legs, revealed in the new mini-skirts that had come into fashion. Sometimes he really did love the twentieth century. He kept his smile respectful though, never resting for too long on any one girl, watching the door of the high school as students poured out, looking for one dark head in particular.

When he saw her, Adam’s eyes lit up. He tracked her movements across the school yard. He knew the instant she saw him. Her smile broke out and she said something to the girl next to her and headed toward him at a rather unladylike pace. He caught her close as she reached him, pulling her tight against him. Then, knowing all her friends were watching, knowing what it meant to be dating the “older boy” with the car and the job and the right jacket, he kissed her, fingers curling around the back of her neck in a possessive grip she didn’t seem to mind in the least.

“Where have you been?” she asked, a little breathless when he lifted his head and pulled away to open the car door for her.

“I had to go to Odessa and check on the company,” he said, as she slid across the seat and climbed in behind the wheel.

“The paper place?” Her nose wrinkled just a bit, and Adam reached out to flick it lightly with his finger.

“The paper place, yes.” Though it was already turning in to so much more. Not his dream, not yet, but the foundation at least as he hired scientists and built labs underneath the structure. Three floors down, it was a labyrinth and only he knew the secrets it already held.

“But you’re back now, at least for a while?” He noticed the slightly cool tone, with an amused quirk of his lips, the little way she adjusted her sunglasses, the way she didn’t quite look at her friends as they pulled away, and yet made sure everyone noticed.

“I’m back for as long as you want me,” he murmured, just for her, in a tone that brought heat to her cheeks. She’d barely turned sixteen, and though she tried to give him a worldly smile, the sheer innocence behind it made him almost laugh.

* * *

December 1964

“You want me to what?” Angela sat up and stared down at Adam where he was stretched out on the rug like he’d grown a second head.

He took a moment to study her, the way her hair curled damply around her face and the flush growing on her skin, heightened by the lights he’d strung on the tree in his apartment. He reached out and traced his fingers over her, almost in wonder, then wound them through her hair and tugged her back down to him, where she belonged.

His lips brushed over hers, tongue light and teasing. “I want you to go out with him.”

Eyes fluttering closed she shifted to slide on top of him. “With Arthur?” she asked with an expert shifting of her hips that made him moan and arch up into her, cutting off what she might have said in a gasp as he filled her. After he’d gotten her past her initial reservations, the first night he’d taken it beyond kisses and clandestine touches, she had proved to be a very apt pupil, following him even into the darker corners of desire with an eagerness to please and be pleased that he had found so rarely.

“With Arthur,” he murmured against her lips, hips rocking again. “Yes.”

“Why?” she asked, pulling away a little before he grabbed her hips and pulled her back down on him, fingers pressing hard enough to leave marks. Her eyes fluttered closed again, and he smiled.

“We need him. And he asked,” he reminded her, one hand sliding up her side to cup her breast, thumb teasing over her nipple.

“What about us?” There it was, the youth the vulnerability, the girl he’d found and made his.

“Nothing needs to change. Arthur never needs to know.”

She frowned, just a bit, and he tugged her lips back to his, kissing her, moving inside her, until the questions drifted away.

* * *

( June 1965 )

OOC: Angela Petrelli used with permission of her mun as we create backstory for them. :-)