Title: Here Again

Author: Goddessa39

Cannon: Charmed

Disclaimer: No, Chris, Bianca, and the people and ideas of the Charmed world are most definitely not mine... if they were, then 'Chris-Crossed' would have so ended up differently.

Time line: This takes place in the changed future.

Genre: Supernatural/Tragedy

Pairings: Chris/Bianca mainly with little bits of others.

Summary: Despite the occasional demon, the Halliwell family was perfectly happy. But Chris... he knew something was missing. (Chris.Bianca)

A/N: Although I like to portray Piper, and even Leo sometimes, in a good light, I've been sitting on this little idea for a while and am finally getting it out.

He's bleeding to death on his mother's bed, his red life soaking from his belly and onto the previously clean floral sheets. His throat feels raw and there are tears behind his eyes because the truth is that though he will welcome death with open arms, he does not want his father, the father he just connected with finally, to see it.

Such a helpless and stupid thing, to see a child die. No parent should go through it and yet it occurred all the time.

His thoughts choked around his own dead daughter with her dark strawberry hair and her green eyes, and the son along with his fiance; sometimes he ponders what his son would have looked like-maybe dark hair like his own and the blue eyes of Bianca's mother or the green that seemed to run through the Halliwell family beside brown. His mind wondered back to the future that he would not let be to the brother who had been swallowed by darkness and the very aura of helpless fear and death that swept across the world on his fourteenth birthday. Piper Halliwell had fallen along with the rest of the family inside of the house, save for the single birthday boy and the brother that hadn't come to help him.

Birthday's. He laughed hollowly. If he died according to irony, then this would be the night of his birth and death as well. Something crawled up his throat then and a pain overtook him as he cupped his wound and came up with red on his fingers. It hurt, and he could not help wonder if she had felt the same pain. Of course, she had been penned to the wooden table leg. the knife that had stuck him through two ribs at least had left behind a gaping hole that was slowly letting him float away.

Trying to push himself up to see it was a fail and he fell back to the covered pillow and his head threatened to bang against the wall.

A sound came from his mouth that wasn't distinguishable between a cough, a whimper, or a laugh at the irony of it all. Leo watched him, talked to him and the tears threatening to erupt spilled down his cheeks without waiting for the man's loss. He already felt the guilt.

"Just save Wyatt," the dark brunette with a past of pain said.

Because, what else was there to say? It wasn't like he could have been buried.

Dark hair spiked up above blue eyes and was rustled in the wind as he set himself against a tall tree. The park was full of people laughing and smiling, the kids he watched now especially. And yet, the look on his face was one so rare that his mother, sitting at a picnic table looked at him with sad eyes.

Her son hadn't always been a sad young man. He was nearly twenty-three now and yet... and yet he just didn't know how to be happy. As a baby he had been loud and excited just as his big brother and little sister were. The middle child was now just a quiet and lonely man. Everybody in the underworld knew his name of course. It wasn't like anyone couldn't not know one of the most feared men.

...a door banged open and she stepped through and into the home. Moonlight reached through the window and tendrils of the shiny night seemed to reach towards her as if they wanted to stop her...

Wyatt of course was that 'perfect young man' any mother dreamed of. He'd passed through high school and then college with, not the best grades, but enough to get through it fine. He had always been excitable and athletic. His blonde hair and ocean blue eyes, a definite trait inherited from his father, made him a very attractive young man. He'd been 'caught' by a nice young woman a few years ago and they'd married. Four year old Petra played with her younger sister they simply called Plum whose face was red beneath their father's deft fingers. They giggled loudly in their own space in the park and the happiness radiated from them like bottled sunshine.

Piper sighed as she folded some napkins and placed a corner underneath one of the baskets so they wouldn't fly away in that same wind that was ruffling her darker son's hair. She loved Chris, and there was always some part inside of her that was worried.

...a red fireball goes past and smashes against a purple colored wall to leave a dark smear in the paper and an indent in the very wall. It wasn't very powerful but it held speed enough for surprise...

Though Wyatt had intended to go into childrens' medicine, Chris had talked him into teaching. And indeed that was probably the best thing that could have happened. Maybe he wasn't the most organized or patient but his attitude and direction just made him perfect for the job. If he had gone into medicine as he'd planned, Piper knew that he would have burned out, too determined to help every child that came by with a cold those dying little angels stuck with leukemia.

...the little girl looks up at her and holds a large blue teddy tightly in her grasp. Violet eyes stare up at her and the beating of her heart pounds in ears louder than drums of the Anasazi. Lips tight and the fingers trying to break into the warm fur show her fear and apprehension...

She glanced at her younger son whose face gad gone back to its normal overcast setting since his brother had made Plum cry in exertion with the sun and moon hiding behind his shadowed eyes. Scratching an itch on her hand she looked down slightly and then turned her face to the sky to not be caught gazing and wished to herself that he could just be happy. It wasn't like anything bad was going on in these last few years could even be said to have been some of the best years in the Charmed Ones' lives.

...the blond fights against her with the will of a lioness protecting her cub and it occurs to the witch that what she is doing can only be the right thing as she spots the red mark stretched across an arm on, first the mother's, and then the child's arm...

But Chris... well, he had always been just so morose. There was nothing explainable going on, and the counsellor his past schools had made him see had declared that it was just a small part of being autistic. Autistic. She'd laughed. He wasn't autistic, though he had never been one for open comments and direct vocabulary with anyone less than family. They say that genius comes with a price and part of that is letting go of some of the more normal mental ideas.

She scoffed mentally again and held pride in her son. He was a high class diagnostician who specialized in children. For it to work he'd had to take both the medical side of his job in full degree and the counseling side of it.

...she wonders sometimes, what that girl would have become. Her bloodline what she would have been taught had a direct lead down to hell and past the underworld and (right passed Go, do not collect two hundred dollars) into their lives with her own childrens' very blood...

Her daughter, Melinda, with her bright expressions and darker features, had taken after Leo and gone directly into medicine. She was in college now and working towards a nursing degree. Melinda had come into the living room one day after her first year and exclaimed how much of a saint her big (but not biggest) brother was to have gone through that as well as the second stack of courses.

...afterwords she washed and threw away her clothes. She placed the relaxes smile over her face and it soom became real as, one by one, her children and the others walked through the door as if there was nothing wrong in the world...

She thought about Chris's latest case. Rebbecca Myers had stopped talking suddenly and had come down with an unexplainable heart condition. She was now on the transplant list but nothing could explain it. With his patience and everpresent determination, Dr. C. Halliwell had managed to worm his way beneath the girl's very skin and made her smile by his unquestioned calm and presence.

That was always something she herself had never understood. Her second baby boy had an aura of kindness despite the way that she had seen him fight and defend the family against a horde of incoming demons.

...when she remembers them all she sees is the fist in a swirling chest and the boy against the wall and looking up as if he does not understand...

When the sun begins its descent they leave for the day and their home smells of family and the ever-potent scent of candles and wonderful cooking leftover from days gone by. She watches as the younger two generations go inside.

...and that look on his face that scares her for the rest of her life-that look of determination and fight and dueling that only that damn girl will meet...

Sighing heavily, she takes in the air. There will be a slight rain in two days but she doesn't know it-the oxygen is just a little bit cooler and the water has risen to fill the sky. Her eyes tighten and her hands fist when none of the younger people are watching.

...and in her nightmares she sometimes remembers that broken look of that liar that came spilling from the blue mass of energy as he fell to the floor. She didn't need to feel what he did to know he was in such pain despite the mostly unharmed look of him. Gaunt features haunt her nightmares along with the unfeeling smiles and emptiness of him after he came back from something...

She loves her boy but wishes he would relax and gain the smile he'd had as a baby. There was this part of him no one could reach, some piece of him that could not stop fighting a war that had never come to pass. She wondered if Chris Perry had really ever died and hated herself more for it.

...she's holding her new baby, her second son and is being told by her husband and the baby's father that the man that helped them has died for them and the baby's brother and has bled all over the bed, and all she says is that she's holding their baby in her arms...

He doesn't date or make friends, doesn't socialize with people he doesn't know unless he must. His brother tries to get him to open up occasionally but he just shakes his head and goes back to what he was doing; working to keep the family safe from the enemies. He grabs some sage and an apple. Slicing it, he bites into a piece while working with the rest to pit it into tiny pieces. Making a potion is an art but not everything can be perfect.

When they were young, he'd go to her room and brush her hair with his fingers and the comb she kept by her bed. When she couldn't sleep, she's slip into bed with one of her brothers and the other would get up to join them. Melinda is the ideal little sister in some ways; but she likes to bother him sometimes and tries her best to manipulate him the way their older brother is (whipped) wrapped around her finger and fails, only to ask her socially inept sibling for help on her college assignments. Sometimes she brings her friends over and they ogle tall-dark-and-handsome, even going as far as the flirt without care and burst into his own time that is ticking away.

His father tries to have serious talk with him a few times and does his best not to say anything wrong. Leo love his sons and daughter in their own ways with equal amount. But there was always something different about the middle child that both made him different from the rest of the world and worried the family; it just lay dormant in the back of their minds. It had come up so he had asked him one June day out of the blue, blue sky why he didn't have many friends or even a girlfriend, why he didn't talk with others or go out and party a few times that his brother didn't force him. The only thing he'd ever said on the subject was that, "there is something missing."

Nobody sees it coming and later the demons will multiply when they find one of their greatest threats has fallen to something different. Wyatt comes home from the grocery store as quietly as he can and Melinda has been ordered to clean and wrap the last of the presents and keep her brother away from the surprise party.

Chris hears this and just gives a small amused smile and does his best to stay out of the way. Piper is alone in the kitchen for this, since he's the only one who inherited those particular skills from either sister, He takes a long shower, the hot liquid spilling over muscles and raw wounds that have not quite healed over. No one else has seen to them. No one else will.

He hisses and steam rises, filling the small bathroom as he massages his arms and works out the kink in his leg that had gone over the edge of the bed at a weird angle in the middle of the night a day or two before. Soaping up the loofah, he runs it over the edge of his joints and the edges of his body, trying to bring himself some sort of comfort as the water falling from the soft faucet becomes hot enough to burn skin.

When he feels clean and his skin turns red, he orbs away to the cool arctic regions until his skin has paled back into a shade that looks normal. Returning to the manor he dresses slowly and takes his time. The day is filled with the normal things and he tells no one when he goes off for another demon in the Underworld. The sulfur he washes off with the same hot water.

Halliwell manor opens its doors to yet more family and they greet him with hugs and smiles. When his mother instructs him to finish his chores and discreetly (thinks his mother) points towards the presents and then the kitchen. He does so with a small smile and grabs the folded towels. Jaunting patiently to the cupboards and then the bedrooms, he places them down as the fragrance flies from the kitchen and he decides that must be where the Gods get their ambrosia from.

He sits on his mother's bed and refolds a few of the towels and sets them on the edge where he can pick them up.

Downstairs, they whisper and giggle to themselves as the twenty-fourth birthday party is held for the second born of the second born Halliwell sister begins to be finally celebrated and-

the family calls for its birthday boy who must be done with the simple thing as putting away the towels.

There is a sudden sound upstairs and Piper nearly growls in annoyance. Why do demons always decided to attack during celebrations? She looks pointedly at her other son and he is already orbing away to the attic. Another feeling makes itself known and the hairs on the Charmed Ones' necks prickles along with goosebumps down arms. There is magic in the house, something they know but cannot pinpoint. The family is already orbing/phasing/shimmering the the ancestral Halliwell home of the Book of Shadows.

There is a body on the ground.

...air choked from a throat by magic instead of a fist...

Wyatt is bent low and wearing a serious and yet confused look in his open face. His fingers touch the woman's throat but they all recognize that she is dead. A large wooden splint has gored the woman between the chest and belly, blood pooling around her in a deep splash of red.

...anger, fear and love covering her thoughts as she brawls through decisions. What to do? She has not been spying for her fiance for nothing...

They talk quickly. What is going on? No one knows. Wyatt tells them they were like this when he got up to the attic. He calls for his brother. Nothing. He calls again. Piper calls, "Chris!" and something cold races through her heart as she feels the familiartity of it. Leo freezes beside her for a moment before he goes racing out of the attic, down the small staircase and down the hall of the upper story.

They follow, the lot of them. There are three Charmed sisters five of the second generation and three of the third and

...He's bleeding to death on his mother's bed, his red life soaking from his belly and onto the previously clean floral sheets. His throat feels raw and there are tears behind his eyes...

they find him.

..."We'll see each other again"...

..."Maybe"...

END.

Okay, if you didn't get it, then someone (a female, probably Piper) went and killed Lynn and Bianca knowing they were connected to Chris. I've been sitting on the idea of 'what if Piper went and killed her baby's soulmate' and this is what came out. It isn't perfect, isn't meant to be some huge story, and yes, is defenitly sad. Without the presence of his soulmate, Chris cannot be even really content.

Tell me if you like it.