Who. Adrian Wilder (Guest appearances by NPC!Jim & Evelyn Wilder and various other NPCs) Type. Backstory! (A defining moment in Adrian's life.) What. Adrian becomes a man When. July 8th, 1999. Where. The Pyramid Restaurant, Sparks, NV Warnings. PG-13 for violence and NPC death.
Once, when he was fourteen years old, Adrian was helping his dad Jim close up the restaurant they owned back when they lived in Sparks, NV on the night where two men broke in. They knocked Jim down, but Adrian hid behind the bar before they could see him. The men took his dad's wallet and read their home address out loud, then kept going on about the things they would do to Adrian's mother and any brats they might have if his dad didn't give them every last cent he owned, and then some. Jim Wilder realized that, no matter what he did or didn't do, these men were mad dogs. They'd kill him and probably do unspeakable things to his family before killing them too, and all for a couple hundred bucks, which was all he had in the till. The last deposit had been made by the evening staff, so all that was left was petty cash, and he didn't keep any substantial amount of money over at the house. He fought back. Jim decked one of the men to the floor, his gun skittering away into the darkness under a booth. The second man laughed like they were putting on a show, and didn't immediately help his accomplice. He waited until the first man knocked Jim down and started kicking him. Then he grew bored and stabbed his knife into a table.
Adrian didn't know how, but that little voice inside his head told him the moment that man decided to kill his father. He saw it in the set of his jaw, in the humor leaching from his eyes. He saw the man draw a gun from behind his belt and sprang into action.
It all happened so fast, Adrian could hardly remember how he took the shotgun his dad always kept loaded behind the counter, one hand on the forearm and one on the grip behind the trigger like he'd done this his whole life. He sprang to his feet with the agility of youth, even though at the same time it seemed everything was happening in slow motion. It was as if someone was dictating his every move, which was exactly what was happening. Leo Wyatt had been a soldier before he became a Whitelighter, and the memories of his arms training came in handy at a time like this. There was no time for fear. Every step the bad man took was one step closer to his father's death. Adrian fluidly fell into a stance roughly 40 degrees to the right of his target without giving it a thought. He pushed the shotgun slightly away from himself, and moved the butt up to his shoulder in a subtle arc until it was resting against his cheek. He pointed, snuggling the gun into his shoulder, and pulled the trigger.
The burglar got a shot out even as the boy's round bit into his chest, but it went wide, missing him entirely. He had seen Adrian appear out of the corner of his eye, and was turning to shoot him even as the fourteen year-old pulled the trigger. Had Adrian hesitated, he would have been dead, shot between the eyes. The pistol slipped from the burglar's fingers as he looked down at the hole where his chest had been. A panicked Adrian fumbled as he tried to reload. There was another dangerous man to deal with here, and he'd be just as dead if he didn't do something about it.
"You little shit, I’m gonna kill you first for that!" the other burglar snarled, rounding on the boy. "I'm gonna stick that shotgun where the sun don't shine and see how you like it!"
Adrian gave up on trying to reload the gun. His hands were shaking too badly. Instead, he used the shotgun as a club to try to fend off the violent criminal. The burglar hollered when the hot barrel of the shotgun burned his blocking arm, then again when he grabbed the hot metal with his other hand, wrestling the gun away from Adrian's numb hands. All those years of judo, but when the time came, Adrian didn't even have time to think of it. He grabbed for the older man's neck even as the guy began to choke him. He could smell the burglar's mix of body odor and whiskey. The man's breath was fetid in his nose. He was going to die.
But another scream cut through the noise of their struggling. Jim came at the burglar with a chair, cracked ribs and all, when he saw the man attack his only son. Adrian scrambled away on all fours, looking for a weapon the moment he was free of the burglar's grasp. He need not have bothered. See, sturdy restaurant chairs don't break easily, like in Hollywood. In fact, pretty much any chair is a lot tougher to smash to pieces than the ones they use on TV and the movies. His father did break that chair on the burglar's back. He didn't stop hitting the man with it until he was sure he'd stopped moving. He then promptly collapsed into a heap, the agony in his ribs dropping him hard as soon as the adrenalin and endorphin soup rushing through his veins was spent.
"Call 911," was all he said, and Adrian obeyed.
Some time later, Adrian shivered under a blanket, sitting on the edge in the back of an ambulance. He saw the coroner roll away a body bag in a stretcher. The burglar who was still alive had already been sent to the hospital, handcuffed to his rolling stretcher. Sparks was tiny. It didn't take that long to hunt down folks and get them where they needed to be unless they'd gone out of town. Still, it was almost dawn now.
The chief of police was coming out of the diner, ducking under bright yellow police tape that one of his deputies held up for him. He saw Adrian and slowed his pace to a halt. The man handed the shotgun, clearly labeled as evidence, to another deputy and made his way towards Adrian.
"How are you holding up, kid?" he asked.
Adrian didn't immediately reply. He stared down at the ground, and only noticed he was sniffling when he went to respond. "They..." he started, and stopped, because his voice was going to break. But this was the police. He had to answer, right?
"They kept saying how they were gonna hurt my mom," the boy finally admitted, breaking down into sobs. "They kept going on about all these... awful things they were gonna do." He sniffled and shook his head. "I didn't mean to kill nobody. I just wanted them to stop hurting my dad. They were gonna kill him. The man he decked, he kept hitting dad, and he wouldn't stop. Then the other guy, he got this look in his eye and I just knew I was gonna see my dad die right before my eyes. I was right behind the bar, and I knew where my dad kept the shotgun. I didn't think. I just did it."
That wasn't entirely true. The little voice inside his head; the one he didn't yet have a name for; had guided his hand, it had cut through his panic and feelings of helplessness and reminded him of the shotgun. It had assured him his dad always kept it loaded and ready. It had shown him the quickest way to get it, point and shoot it to drop the man who would have murdered his father, then gone on to do God knew what to his mom at home.
Adrian was clearly horrified by what he had done, full of remorse even though almost nobody present blamed him for what he did. It was a man's job to defend his family, even if he was fourteen. These Sparks folks, they were of hardy stock. These were the descendants of people who had survived the mean Wild West and lived to settle these lands for good or worse. The law was the law, and they upheld it, but that genetic memory was there, alive.
"Is my dad gonna be okay?" he asked, shaking like a leaf.
The officer in charge, Bill Hopkins, was a regular at the diner. Adrian had never seen such a grim expression on his face as he was wearing tonight. The man must have seen him blanch, because his mouth twisted even further into a worried rictus. Bill put a strong, warm hand on Adrian's shoulder. At fourteen, Adrian was five-foot six, and his shoulders were nearly as wide as they were ever going to get. He wasn't going to get much taller than this, either, but he looked especially small tonight. Bill was six-foot three, and had been a fullback in his youth. He was still built like a wall of muscle. Unlike most of the guys his age around town, he hadn't yet gone to seed.
"Listen, son. I'm the law around these parts, and I know what I'm supposed to tell you. I think you know it too, so I ain't gonna bother. What I tell you know, though, that's between you and me. Man to man, not cop to man." He waited a beat for that to sink in before going on. "Your dad's a decent man. He's gonna be fine. And that's thanks to you. Your family's good people, and you're a good kid. Except you ain't a kid any more, and we both know it, don't we?" He squeezed Adrian's shoulder, and the boy felt like he could breathe again, he was so relieved. "Killing a man changes you, son. There ain't no going back. But you do it to defend your country, to defend your family? Then at least you done it for the right reasons, and you need to hang on to that truth. You hear me? You hang in there, Adrian. Everything's gonna be fine."
The little voice that was Leo Wyatt told him he could trust this man, and Adrian's crying subsided to the occasional sniffle. He nodded at Hopkins and muttered a heartfelt thank you, and for once he didn't add a sir at the end. That was the end of his childhood.
Or, at least of an aspect of it. To Adrian's mother, he would forever be her little boy.
Evelyn Wilder's voice cut through the murmur of the crime scene like a buzzsaw. Adrian figured she had to be pretty damn mad to sound that shrill. He was glad to hear that tone wasn't directed at him or his dad, for a change. Evelyn was a great mom, and a hell of a woman, but she had a mighty temper. Adrian should know. He got it from her.
"Stop talking about my baby like he's some criminal, Edward Hicks. You mind your tone now! What would your momma say if she could hear you now? Now, where is he? I'm not gonna ask again!" Adrian saw the top of her head first as she pushed past people to get to her son. He immediately swallowed back his sobs and clamped down hard on his nerves, wiping furiously at his eyes with his sleeve to dry the tears on his face. Everybody knew big boy's don't cry. Adrian hadn't cried in front of his mother since he was nine years old, and he was still ashamed of it five years later. "Be certain Christine is gonna hear about this," Evelyn threw over her shoulder at Hicks, making a mental note to call his wife in the morning. The angry lioness disappeared the moment she laid eyes on her son.
"Adrian! Baby," she cried out as she ran to him, wrapping the boy in her arms. It was embarrassing to Adrian, but also very comforting, so he hugged her back.
"I'm fine, ma. You're making a scene," he chided meekly.
"Now don't you worry about that. Are you all right? You're sure? You don't say anything to these vultures, you hear? We're the victims here! I've already called Charlie, and he's on his way," Evelyn went on, informing Adrian that she'd contacted a family friend who was also a lawyer.
"Baby, listen to me. I know what happened here tonight was just godawful, but that's not your fault. Okay? I know you're thinking killing is wrong, and that's what we've taught you. That's all fine and good, but you need to know that self-defense isn't wrong. Do you understand? You were in fear for your life, and you're a minor. Don't you worry about a thing," she whispered fiercely at her son. He had a sense that, if they came to arrest him, they'd have to pry him from his mother's stiff, dead hands, and he wasn't that far from the truth. Evelyn's strong face softened, and she started to cry quietly. "You're a good boy, you hear? You're my good boy. We'll get through this as a family."