Another Gift of the Heart
A Christmas W.i.t.c.h. fic by: A J
(Standard disclaimer applies)
"Jingle bells, our passling smells, Rissi laid an egg; Phobie fell down, and bent his crown, and the Guardians got awaayyyy-ay," Irma sang, swinging her Yugo into Joel's driveway. Her blonde boyfriend chuckled.
"I think that's even better than your last one, Ir-mine," Martin said, smiling at his long-time crush.
"You're just saying that 'cause you're my number one fan," she responded, grinning. "'course, it'd almost HAVE ta be better ... I mean, 'Grandma got run over by a hoogong', honestly ..." She rolled her eyes in her schoolmate-stalker's direction, and they both broke down in helpless laughter. Irma eventually managed to set her parking brake, and the pair went inside for another night of time wasted trying to plan a successful Christmas around everybody's families' crazy schedules. It had seemed so much easier a month ago …
w.i.t.c.h.
The Thanksgiving dinner Elyon and her parents had tried to pull together, with all the W.i.t.c.h. and C.h.k.y.m. girls and their families invited, had bombed spectacularly, thanks in no small part to Elly's 'cousin' Caleb's estranged mother Nerissa literally crashing the party. She appeared unexpectedly in a flash of green energy just as Eleanor and Thomas came out of their kitchen, straining under the weight of a freshly Fire-roasted hoogong. With no time for the usual parental distraction, the six teen girls had immediately swung into action as their superhero selves, thoroughly blowing their cover once and for all, at least as far as their families were concerned.
The Hale parents had been doubly surprised. Both their daughters were magical. The sudden transformation of Will's dormouse and Lillian's cat into hulking protective warriors, who heaved the dinner table upright to protect Elizabeth, Harold and Lillian from the battle had shaken the Hales, but not nearly as much as when the pair bowed before their youngest girl, called her Mistress, and asked for her orders. Lillian, only just learning her powers, had stuck squarely - and smartly - behind her Regents' cover and willingly healed any of the Guardians and Elyon after it was all over.
Hay had been as floored as her father Chen to find that Joan Lin already knew about the Guardians, being the great-great-great-granddaughter of the Earth Guardian two teams before C.h.k.y.n. Her family had maintained the knowledge of the Hearts and Candracar, and had kept tabs on her teammates' descendants, knowing that new Guardians would arise from among them sooner or later. After the loss of Nerissa and Cassidy, the Heart's disposition had been unclear, and only a chance meeting between Joan Reece and Chen Lin in college had set things straight. Joan had known her little girl was the Air Guardian from the day Yan had given the Heart to Will Vandom, and couldn't have been prouder; she'd just never said anything. Chen, seeing that his daughter was now following both sides of the 'family business', now wisely bowed to the inevitable and did likewise.
Tom and Anna Lair, upon finding out that their presumed-flaky daughter was instead a magical warrior of considerable skill, had declared her chore-free until New Years … with one exception; she still had to baby-sit her brother whenever asked. Cass had volunteered with a smirk to rush over and cover for her in the case of any G-mergencies.
Taranee had spent all of ten minutes grounded for life by her Judge and lawyer parents, until intervention by her predecessor Halinor and testament by Yan and Mira Lin had softened them up. She'd been conditionally paroled; Taranee now had to tell Theresa and Lionel Cook everything the Guardians did, in case it came back up in an Earth court. EVER.
Elyon and the other Guardians thought Will might have the worst punishment, though. When Mina, the hurriedly-summoned Altermere of the girls' leader, had jumped lightning-first into the fray with Nerissa instead of helping get the parents away to safety, her progenitor had been stuck playing shield for the unempowered. Finally performing a kamikaze dive on Nerissa and blowing the pair of them out of that reality in a blinding burst of quintessence, Mina'd left a shaken mother and a bereft twin to agonize and explain alone in her wake. Worse, (in Will and Susan's eyes,) despite searching dimension after dimension, Will still hadn't been able to find her spirit-'sister', and the Vandom women were decidedly not in a festive mood.
The two brothers, Chris Lair and Peter Cook, had stayed out of all the arguments and confessions ... until they were over. Chris was too jealous of all the girls, especially Lillian, and ran to the comfy chair in the furthest corner to pout. Peter, three years older than the Guardians and already graduated, had walked up to a still-transformed Cornelia, his girlfriend of less than a month, and proposed on the spot. At the vehement cries of both their parents, his only answer had been "Where else am I gonna find this perfect a woman?" Ever-practical Cornelia's reply that she was graduating before even considering matrimonial offers got them all laughing, but the steamy kiss she gave Peter afterwards got the rest of the Guardians and Elyon to start whistling and cat-calling even worse.
Martin, Eric and Nigel, the boyfriends of the Water, Air and Fire girls respectively, were in on the truth as well, having been abducted recently by a less-than-scrupulous foe of the Guardians along with Peter, Elyon's boyfriend Matt, and the drummer of the boys' band Joel, to try to keep them too busy to stop its plans. W.i.t.c.h. had merely let Matt, the third Regent of the Heart of Earth, rescue himself and the other guys, and had dealt decisively with that particular enemy.
w.i.t.c.h.
Now the team and the band were reconvening for the third night in a row. They had a week before Christmas, and wanted to make this holiday perfect. Joel welcomed them in, and after the customary wave of greeting to his dad in the kitchen, Irma and Martin followed Joel out to the Campbell's heated, sound-dampening garage, the band's usual practice space.
"Hail, hail, the gang's all here …" Irma said as they entered.
"Nearly all," Matt replied, from the corner. He was tuning his E string by the amplifier. "Nige and Taranee are running late … flat tire." Irma gaped at him for a moment, then smirked.
"Seriously? They both live, like, two blocks away. Why didn't they just walk? And don't blame the weather; it's too beautiful out there for words."
"Nah, they were bringing something from Nigel's house," Peter said from the old couch in front of the garage's main door. He and Cornelia were cuddled up together under an afghan on one end. Will occupied the other, morosely nursing a gigantic cup of cocoa.
"Unless it's another sofa – and I can't see that; his hatchback's smaller than mine – nothing shoulda been worth the gas at these prices," the Water Guardian mused.
"Do I count?" asked a familiar voice from behind her. The whole room spun to find not just Nigel and Taranee, but Cassidy, Caleb, Aldarn, and the one who'd spoken, Elyon Brown.
Now Queen of Meridian, one of the three continents of Metamoor, as well as the mystical Heart of her world, Elyon was usually only in Heatherfield for school on weekdays. (The running gag, started by her adopted parents, was 'Even a magical monarch needs a diploma.') But since their troubled Thanksgiving, she'd been away from Earth, ensuring the safety of her people in the wake of Nerissa's reawakening. She'd also been trying to find out just how the former Guardian-turned-madwoman had escaped what should have been permanent incarceration in the jewel-prison she had once held her own team and the young queen in.
Matt was across the floor so fast he may have teletransported. He wrapped Elyon in his arms, his guitar dangling across his back by its strap. "Hail to the Queen," he murmured into her hair after the pair had exchanged a steamy kiss. The Guardians giggled around them.
"So what's all the kerfuffle, Cassiedile?" Irma asked, giving her 'cousin' an elbow-jab.
"Just an experiment we wanna run by Willie here," Cass replied, pulling Will into a headlock and giving her a 'noogie'.
"Should I worry?" the redhead sputtered.
"What kind of experiment?" Taranee asked for the rest of them.
"A way to track for "Rissi, and maybe Mina, too," Cassidy said, letting Will go to hold her by the shoulders and meet her gaze.
"Really?" Hay squeaked.
"Really really, Sprite," Aldarn chuckled, tugging on her pigtails.
"That's it, no more Shrek for you guys," Cornelia groaned, rolling her eyes.
"Absolutely, your worship," Peter muttered into her hair with a grin. She just growled and pulled him down into a real kiss.
"So how do we do this?" Will asked, taking out the Heart of Candracar.
"Good instinct," Elyon nodded at it. "Okay, Cass suggested this, based on something that happened early on when C.h.k.y.n. were the Guardians. They teamed up with an allied Heart from …"
"Arkhanta," Cass supplied.
"Thanks for that …and used the pooled power to work unmatched levels of magic. Sound familiar?"
"Like what Nerissa tried to do with you, and the Heart of Zamballa," Will shuddered, giving Elyon a sympathetic nod.
"Exactly," Cassidy concluded. "Now, we have, what? Three Hearts? That'll work together willingly?" she added with a grin.
"Too right," Matt and Eric both nodded.
"So." Elyon reached a hand out, palm down, to Will. "Let's make a long-distance call to your sister, shall we?"
"Absotively posilutely," Will said, putting hers on top. Matt followed suit, grinning at his former and present girlfriend in turn.
"What do we do, Cass?" the local band frontman asked, his eyes glowing green.
"Everybody join in, help the focus," Cassidy said, linking hands with Hay and Irma, and adding them to the building circle of power.
"Even … even us?" Martin gulped. When Peter nodded his own affirmative and put his hand in, followed by the rest of the band, Martin nodded, gulped again, and joined them as well.
"Now picture Mina, as we saw her last on Thanksgiving, folks," Elyon asked of the crowd of teens. Hay, in a flash of inspiration, called up an Airy vision of Guardian-Mode Mina above them for those who weren't there. "Thanks, Hay-hay!" Elyon now had to yell above the quickly building energy of their group. "Okay, Will, Matt, on three, we reach! One …"
"Two!" Matt sang next.
"Three!" Will called, and sent all her wishes and the energy of both her Hearts into the plea to the Infinite Dimensions to return her sister. In an actinic burst centered where Hay's mirage quickly dissipated, a fold opened into the Multiverse, billowing and pulsing with the gathered teens' collective eldritch energy …
… and revealing Will's missing Altermere sister, who leapt through without ado, and settle in front of them, panting.
"MINA!" the rest of the Guardian girls caroled as they rushed her in a group hug. "Where have you been?!" Will continued, tearfully.
"You wouldn't believe me, sis," was her soft reply. The others, stepping back to give the Vandom girls their space, all noticed something at once: though no longer transformed, Mina was still in the older body she and Will assumed in their Guardian guise. It took Mina resting her head on Will's with a sigh for her 'sister' to catch the difference between them.
"What the ..? Mina … you're older ...?" Will finally managed to sputter.
"Yeah …" Mina was silent for a moment, until the breathless anticipation of the rest of the room got her to smirk. "That blast that took me and the 8!+(# away?" Her smirk grew wider at the shocked looks the others gave her for her language. "Turns out with enough Quintessence, you can access dimensions where the time-flows aren't as stable as they are nearby. We sent each other somewhere where we ended up battling for years, neither of us sure just how far we were from home."
"I thought folding was just a matter of visualizing your destination?" asked Martin, still trying to learn all the rules behind their magical reality.
"For nearby planes, yeah, that's enough," Mina sighed. "But where we were stranded, out past the realms of Order, time either slowed to a snail's pace, or galloped by like herds of hoogongs, and the second either of us thought we had a way out, the portals vanished on us. It took us finally burying the hatchet to pool enough power to leave even that dimension."
Hay Lin, who'd giggled at the hoogong reference, blinked and gasped. "You made peace ..? With Nerissa ..?"
"Yeah, Sprite." Mina reached out and ruffled the youngest Guardian's hair. "She started seeing me as the rebellious daughter she would have wanted to raise, the sister she'd never been able to give Caleb, and I … well, she's always been a second mother of a sort to me, since I wouldn't even be here if not for her, our subsequent past aside …"
"You said you fought for years …" Will murmured. She looked up sharply at the older Altermere. "How many years were you there?"
"Like I said, the time flow wasn't exactly stable," Mina countered. "But the watch you had on when we transformed at Thanksgiving had a calendar setting, and the battery's electron flow was pretty consistent thanks to my quintessence, so …" Mina held her arm out for her sister and the others to see. Will pushed the button on the side of Mina's watch to switch from time to date, and gulped.
"Mina, you've only been missing from here for three weeks …" she started.
"You're older than I am," Cassidy blurted, then added with a smile, "subjectively, of course." Cassidy, after doing the math from her last day as a Water Guardian originally and the moment Rissi had brought her back to hypnotized life, had come to the conclusion that she had just turned twenty-three. Mina had a couple years on her now.
"Only if you're counting from her birthday, Cassiedile," Irma said, pointing at Will. "Mina was only born four years ago, here in Heatherfield just before the school dance."
"Well, then I'm half her age," Mina chuckled.
"If you're here now, where's Nerissa?" Peter asked from the back of the group, his arms still wrapped around Cornelia.
Mina's face fell. "Years …" She gulped herself now. "Years of using her own life-force to continually attack me, first in anger, then frustration, and finally out of habit, weakened her more than she would willingly admit. Then, when we'd both missed the only semi-stable portal to a nearer dimension, because we were too busy trying to make sure the other wouldn't make it, she just … gave up." With another sad sigh, she told Caleb, "By then, she just wanted to see you and your dad one last time … to apologize, for all those years she didn't spend with you two before now. She …"
Mina had to hold back tears to continue. "She made sure we'd make it home." Mina brought out her duplicate of the Heart of Candracar, and everyone gasped. The once-pink orb was now a swirling pale grey, and they could clearly see the tiny, reposed figure inside. "I'm no longer a Guardian; I haven't been for years. The sheer number of dimensions between us, and the varying time distortion, severed my connection to the Aurameres and Candracar. I'm now the bearer of the Heart of Nerissa."
"Sis," Will and Caleb both said, embracing her together. The other Guardians and Elyon were next, followed by Matt and Peter, then finally, sheepishly, the rest of the band, Aldarn and Martin as well. Overcome with her welcome, Mina cried freely. Finally, the others released her, until only Will and Cassidy were left holding on, one to each side. "So, what now?" Will asked. "I mean, besides telling Mom the good news, what do you want to do?" Mina's face scrunched up, remembering that years-old (for her) disastrous dinner.
"Frak, that's right, Mom knows now …"
"Er, they all do," Peter reminded her. He and Cornelia exchanged a kiss, chuckling.
"Don't remind me," Irma spouted sourly. "I caught dad sneaking brochures for the Police and Firefighter's Academies into my stack of College apps last week." The others laughed. "It's not funny! I tried to tell him being a Guardian is already a full-time job …"
"Yeah, one without a steady paycheck or benefits," Cassidy countered sourly. "Believe me, Irmagator, you'll want something safe and sane to fall back on when Candracar lets you go."
"Since when is becoming a cop sane?" Taranee squeaked.
"When it's my family's other business," Irma sighed.
"I'll stick with nursing, thank you very much," Cass said. "I'm even getting credit towards my school program for taking care of my mom."
"Wanna double your credits?" Mina blurted, looking down at the Heart still cradled in her hands. "She's safe enough now, and I promised her her freedom once we got back …"
"Who's to say she won't just start all her crazy- *$ $#!+ again?" Peter asked worriedly. Cornelia bopped him on the arm for his language, beating his sister to it.
"Years, Peter," Mina sighed. "She just … doesn't have it in her anymore. And once she's free, I'm … I'm free, too." Mina straightened a little in surprise, grinning at her 'sister'.
"So what're you gonna do then?" Eric asked, his arms around Hay from behind.
"I don't know … I honestly hadn't thought past getting us home, really," Mina sighed.
"Well, do you have to look your age?" Elyon asked.
"With a good glamour, I don't see that being a problem, but why?"
"Two reasons," the young Queen answered. "One, you can keep how long you were gone under wraps until your mum adjusts to your being here, period, and two, well … if I need a diploma, you should, too." The roomful laughed around them, and Will hugged Mina again.
"You're on, your Highness," Mina chuckled. "We'll see who graduates first." She got thoughtful for a second, then turned to face Caleb. "You should join me, 'brother'. It might just come in handy, with all the places we're likely to visit."
"Considering the family business is hero-for-hire at this point, it couldn't hurt," Pete added with a nod, to the laughter of the others. They exited the garage en masse, to tell Susan the good news.
Author's note:
"To all of our readers, from all us friends here, we wish you a merry Christmas, and a happy new year."
A J & friends.