It's been a long time since I've written and posted anything Charmed. This fic is dedicated to Ryeloza whose fics always inspire me as they are so well-written. This one-shot in particular was inspired by Moments After the Summer Dies. Some of these I picked out of random shorts I'd written and shortened for the one-shot. Pattie, Prue and Andy's daughter, reflects on their deaths and how it's affected her.
There are a few things that might be helpful when reading. First of all, some things are different from Second Chances, because that story is really AU and not so much how my Charmed world is. In my reality:
-Prue died jumping in front of the energy ball to save Pattie, not Dr. Griffiths.
-Piper names her daughter Penelope Melinda (I call her Ellie)
-Andy does not learn Pattie is his daughter until shortly before his death.
-Pattie was born October 19, 1992.
I'd really appreciate any reviews.
One.
She goes to the ocean without knowing.
A little over ten years ago Prue had sat in this very spot mourning her own mother. She'd grieved, she'd sulked, and despite Pattie's belief that her mother was incapable, Prue cried.
Staring out into the ocean, she listens as the waves roll over themselves and crash to shore. Seagulls fly high above her head, their wings flapping in the wind. The sound of her own whimper stings in her ears.
Ten years ago Pattie lost her mother, and now has only the sounds of what once was to comfort her.
Two.
It's the littlest of waves that can create a riptide large enough to soak everyone in grief.
"Pattie, just eat it. Its bread with cheese and it's exactly what you asked for."
"No it's not," Pattie whines, shaking her head and pushing the plate away. "I don't want it."
Four months fresh of her mother's death and three weeks Paige has been trying to assume the void that Prue's absence has left, although it only seems to be growing.
Paige is fed up. "It's a perfectly fine grilled cheese sandwich."
"Then you eat it."
As they're about to both give up, Piper cuts the tension. "What's going on?" she queries, entering the kitchen with an armload of groceries. "Oh," she says after a quick survey of the situation. An obvious answer. "I've got it."
Paige's jaw almost drops in shock when Piper sets the bags on the counter a grabs a knife, separating the grilled cheese in half, right down the center.
One knife, one slice, and Pattie picks up the sandwich for a bite. Just like that.
As if Paige would have known that by cutting her sandwich in half it makes it easier to dip into the soup and somehow more delectable.
For everything in her, Pattie can't bring herself to care. She knows by the sherry shade that flushes in Paige's cheeks that she's embarrassed her aunt. But a stronger part of her feels the sinking reminder that Prue would have done it right.
Three.
By December of their senior year, Pattie has already filled out more college applications than she can count. Ryan, on the other hand, had nothing but a mind flooded with what-ifs; a realm of possibilities that can be his future.
He pulls grabs the empty seat in the library one day during her study, a crashing halt to her peaceful escape.
"What do you think of me going to the academy?"
Suddenly, Pattie is no longer interested in her college essay. She lets the pen fall from her hand and lifts her head. "You mean like to be a correctional officer?"
"I mean like to become a cop. Maybe even the FBI. I think Inspector Wilson has a nice ring to it, don't you?"
Irony has a funny place in this conversation. Maybe it's the fact that Pattie has never told Ryan that her father was a cop. Maybe it's because before this moment her biggest had been that Ryan would choose a future defined by distance and not by danger.
She does not want to play damsel in distress and tell Ryan she cannot bear the thought of him constantly walking out the door to face real-life demons because she has spent a lifetime questioning her own mortality.
"You…don't like the idea do you?" He correctly guesses. "If it's the idea of me being in danger—"
"My dad was a cop."
It's cheap shot because she knows Ryan well enough to know he'll change for her in the drop of a hat. And what contradicts everything is the fact that Andy didn't die in the line of duty, but by helping Pattie and her mother.
But Ryan doesn't know that.
"It would just be better for both of us if maybe you looked elsewhere." She goes back to writing.
The subject isn't brought up again.
Four.
There are 38 candles.
She presses them into the soft sticky frosting and watches them sink one by one. Thirty blue candles for the birthdays she's been alive to celebrate, eight more red ones for the consecutive years she's now been absent. There is no candle for good luck. Like it really matters anyway.
It is late, already after ten o clock and her aunts are at the club. The house is completely silent and she likes it best that way; there is no one to disturb her grief and try to make it disappear.
Pattie strikes the match and holds it to each wick one at a time until there are 38 flames dancing marvelously, swaying to the hum of the radiator. She flicks off the lights and sees an aura of brightness.
The cake is chocolate with chocolate frosting. It is speckled in rainbow sprinkles, over-frosted and looking delicious. If she were here she wouldn't even have any of the cake. These weren't her preferences at all; they are Pattie's, which was the deciding factor in most choices she made.
So Pattie doesn't eat the cake.
Silence is the only voice; in all the time Pattie has been alive she doesn't remember a time where her mother's cheeks hadn't flushed with a cherry redness as they'd circled around her singing cheerfully to mark another year of her life. The direct attention on her was overwhelming and she begged annually for a break from the singing.
So Pattie doesn't sing.
In the end, it is hard to remember what possessed her to make the cake in the first place.
For a brief moment she watches the spheres of light silhouetted against the darkness and she is calm. But when the light switches back on suddenly, Pattie feels her body instantly go numb. She turns to face Wyatt, a mere six years of age, standing in his pajamas and staring yearningly at the cake.
"Are we having cake, Pattie?" he asks innocently, so filled with desire for this late night treat.
Swiftly stricken by anger, Pattie blows out the flames in one breath. "No, Wyatt," she snaps irritably. Seizing the plate, she heads for the trash can and hurls the freshly baked cake into the garbage, smoking candles and all. "Because the birthday girl is supposed to get the first piece, without her we're left with nothing."
Five.
Junior year offers a plethora of new courses not available to underclassman. Pattie, much like Paige, has always been interested in psychology and decides to take human behavior as an elective that year. It surprises her how excited she becomes as a result of the anticipation, having been interested in so few of the obligatory classes structured into her school schedule freshman and sophomore year. This class seems to actually hold some promise.
The first day of school comes and the class seems bearable. Until the teacher their mandatory parenting project. One week, one fake baby, 30% of that quarter's grade.
She can't imagine being a parent to some fake baby who cries and needs constant attention. Even now, Pattie knows that this project will not fare well for her. Because playing mom means drawing from experience, and how is Pattie supposed to step into the shoes of a woman whose presence has been merely in thought for years?
That day during lunch, she goes to her guidance counselor to drop human behavior.
Six.
"Everyone always tells me the ways that I'm like mom, but is there anything that makes me like dad?"
Pattie asks Phoebe this one day out of the blue, curious eyes of ten year staring up at her aunt.
It takes Phoebe a long time to pull Pattie apart by her traits and separate them into categories: Prue vs. Andy. It's true her niece is dominantly her sister and always always has been. But underneath the obvious are more concealed things that you need a magnifying glass to see as they're not so prevalent at first glance.
"You have his smile. Those teeth may be your mother's, but the smile is all Andy."
"What else?"
Soon it becomes a game of 'Where's Waldo?', finding the needle in the haystack. "That strange obsession you have with The Beatles. How you can beat anyone in checkers. The way you can actually eat brussel sprouts."
Pattie thinks of these minor attributes with newfound excitement, things she's never considered. Suddenly, she wants to smile just for the sake of knowing that part of her mirrors her father. It's the closest she's ever been to him.
Phoebe's eyes flash with a pang of sudden sadness. "Your constant need to do what's right despite the cost," she says.
"Yeah well," Pattie sighs, her game instantly losing meaning, "look where that got him."
Seven
People ask her all the time how Prue died. It's standard protocol, she tells them she lives with her aunts and they ask what happened to her mother; but Pattie never really has an answer.
If her friends kept track, they would realize that she's weaved a colorful tale of stories, tall tales of the legendary Prue Halliwell and how she met her untimely end. Sometimes it's a car crash, sometimes it's illness. Other times Pattie tells them that no one really knows, like one of Shakespeare's tragedies with the last act ripped out. Part of being a witch means sweeping the demonic area under the rug and feigning ignorance. So she can't tell her friends that her mother was murdered by a whirling tornado of hell, and that bothers Pattie to no end.
Because what she really wants to tell them is that Prue died saving her life.
Eight.
He isn't buried with her family, and she often wonders if this was a mistake.
If she racks her brain then usually she can recall that he did in fact have a family of his own. A mother who was her namesake, a father that may have died in the line of duty? She can vaguely remember stories that he'd told her in the year of time they'd been connected.
They don't even live around here anymore if she remembers correctly. His death had stirred up bad memories and sent them fleeing to another state, desperate to get away.
And she doesn't visit him all that often, more or less because she doesn't quite know what to say, how to convey the emotions that have been pent up in her system for thirteen years now. But nonetheless, she knows the way to his gravestone like a child knows it's parent, even when those paths are blurred somehow it's always able to be recovered. Each time she's here some part of her gets left behind with him, because he always had that effect on her.
The marble is warm in the sun's touch, so that when she crouches down and runs her finger very slowly over each engraved letter it does not give her chills. The scripture of the A, the T, are just so block-line and solid that it doesn't seem welcoming at all. Her skin grazes the hollow spaces of lettering between stone, as if when she sees this all laid out in front of her it's just some kind of trick.
She wonders if things would be different had he not died and left her. Would her mother still be around too? Pattie can't possibly imagine one without the other, like those half-heart friendship bracelets she'd traded with Emily in grade school.
In many ways she wishes he could answer her. There were so many things she was supposed to know about him that are now just questions. Questions that will probably never have an answer. But she hasn't spoken to him since he told them he was going to heaven. Even now, Pattie still believes she has dreamed that final goodbye sitting on a swing in the heavens.
And with Prue dead and gone there's no one to reassure her.
Nine.
Pattie knows stories of her mother and father as a pair. She's been to the past, seen the younger versions of mom and dad traipsing around without a care in the world. Aunt Phoebe has dozens of stories collected from years of listening via the venting system. As a child herself, she witnessed it firsthand.
This fades in comparison to actually feeling it.
She's not looking for the letters but she finds them one day, a forgotten pile of dust hidden within a stack of her mother's old books. The scribbled patch of words seems frivolous at first, until Pattie realizes the sender.
Prue,
I was happy to get your letter. It feels like so long since we last talked, and I mean really talked, not this stupid 'how's the weather' business you've been pulling on me recently. You're not the same Prue you were in college, but I'm not the same Andy either. I'm coming back to San Francisco for the holidays in a few weeks. I'm not sure how long I'll be home because this job isn't too reliable with location, but I'd like to see you. Maybe it's time we get to know each other again, who knows what could happen for us.
I'll be in touch. I'm really hoping you'll take me up on the offer.
Love, Andy.
In the corner, the date reads December 3, 1991.
There are more letters, some before and some after the first, but none dating past September 1992. This mystery night in 1991, Pattie realizes, brought them together again. She is living proof. But her birth ended that.
In the recesses of her mind, Pattie has always wondered the reason her mother and father didn't work.
"It was me."
Ten.
Lately, all Pattie has the energy to do is watch sad movies. The Notebook. A Walk to Remember. Titanic. The case of every tragedy and tear-jerking tale she owns lie open on her desks, the DVD's haphazardly scrambled next to the player. For nine days she pops one in after the other and lets it play until she can repeat the dialogue in her head without even trying.
The Land Before Time is her personal favorite. Pattie watches Littlefoot cope with the death of his mother. She watches the cartoon dinosaur move around on screen and is instantly taken by his loss. Of course, Pattie can relate. Of course, she cries the hardest for this one every time.
Piper would probably say that her behavior is unhealthy, but lately Piper and Leo have been too busy with Chris's soccer and Wyatt's karate to notice.
It's not that she blames them, those kids are in fact theirs and she's nothing more than a permanent houseguest. But Pattie can't help that whenever she sees Piper coddle Ellie her heart is gripped in anguish.
"Are you okay?" Piper asks one day maybe two weeks into her video extravaganza.
Pattie sniffles and wipes her eyes. "Allie doesn't remember Noah." As if this explains everything.
Piper nods and leaves Pattie alone with only her pillow and tragic characters that can empathize in what it's like to be missing everything in life.