A/N: This is a sort of sequel to 'Summer Comes, Winter Fades', but it's not necessary to read that to understand this fic. This story is not completely in chronological order and admittedly, has quite a few scenes from the 'Chris Crossed' episode.
Mainly, it's a character study of Bianca. I know this is a minority opinion, but I think she's a pretty neat character.
Also, it takes place in the Unchanged future (it can fit into canon) and is Bianca/Chris. Some swearing, some violence, nothing major. I think that's it ^^
Please read and review!
"Please don't say you love me,
'Cause I might not say it back
Doesn't mean my heart's not skipping,
When you look at me like that
There's no need to worry when you see just where we're at
Just please don't say you love me
'Cause I might not say it back"
- "Please Don't Say You Love Me" by Gabrielle Aplin
"I love you." Chris tells her one night, unprovoked.
They are wrapped up in one another in bed, intertwined but fully clothed, too exhausted from the day's events to do more than hold each another.
Head on his chest, Bianca stiffens. She can hear his heart beat, smooth and steady, unconcerned with her answer. He's too good for her, she thinks. He doesn't even need a response.
But she still wants to give him one. And she still knows that she can't.
Bianca grips him tighter, pulls him so close that he can't see her face.
"Yeah." She finally chokes out (she knows it's not enough). "Yeah, me too."
Above her, she can feel him smile, and the guilt of it just about kills her.
As much as Bianca hates the apocalyptic world they're all living in, she has to admit that she fits here.
Here, where demonic allies are better than no allies at all; here, where there are no friends, only people you hope won't kill you; here, where there is little time for anything but truth.
This world may be the worst mortals have ever seen, but Bianca recognizes how easy it is for her to live it.
And she likes it. Just a little.
The Phoenix witch feels bad about that, sometimes. She isn't completely heartless, after all. She doesn't like the death or the pain or the suffering.
Maybe what she admires is the simplicity. Anybody you meet is either going to kill you or help you, and they usually won't take long to show you which it is.
Maybe that's why she feels something crumble inside when she spots Chris slipping a small red box into his pocket, right before a dangerous mission. Because the question that accompanies such a ring is one of the most complicated questions on the planet.
I can't be a wife! She thinks immediately, irrationally furious at Chris.
How dare he put this one her?! Doesn't he know how busy, how deadly the lives they lead are?
And what would they do, have the wedding in-between trying to win a war?!
The idea of marriage is so impractical, so difficult and convoluted that she refuses to talk to Chris for anything other than rebel-related plans for the rest of the week.
If he knows why she's angry, he doesn't say. It is a very tense seven days.
All Bianca can think is that marriage and togetherness and happiness are all concepts of a different time, a different world. That ring represents something new and bright and...
Well. If you want to know how dark the world has become, just grab someone off the street and ask.
That ring has no place in her simple, apocalyptic world and she hates Chris for bringing the thing into it.
She really, really hates him. She does.
She's not even scared of marriage or anything.
It's an important mission. That's why Bianca is dressed in her nicest clothes, dolled up with actual makeup and hair-products and everything.
On one hand this feels good – she has missed the art of making her rough edges smooth – but on the other hand, this pageantry grates the practical part of her that says this restrictive skirt could get her killed in a fight.
Bianca kind of understands why pretty dresses and make-up all but disappeared after the apocalypse happened.
Well. Disappeared for everyone except for Wyatt's subservient 'citizens'.
But none of that is important right now, because she and Chris have a mission that is crucial to the war and neither one can afford to be distracted.
And Chris is looking pretty distracted. He keeps fiddling with something in his pocket, murmuring to himself and pacing.
"Chris." She says, her face grave and serious. "We should get going."
"Yeah, yeah, of course." He replies distractedly. "We should. We will – it's just...could we stop by someplace? Just...one last time, could we go to our spot, Bianca?"
Normally, Bianca would laugh and tell him hell no, we're on a mission for the greater good here, Romeo, except this is not a normal errand and there's this strange, disarming vulnerability to Chris's voice.
Her lips can't say anything but,
"Alright, Chris. One last time."
The way Chris's mouth curls up at the edges – his version of beaming – makes her heart warm enough that it's worth it.
He takes her hand, linking their fingers together like he hasn't done in many months, and she closes her eyes with a smile as bells echo and blue lights surround her.
It's been three months since she saw the ring.
She has thought about it a lot, but not today. Not now.
At Their Spot, Chris slides down to one knee as though there's never been a more natural position – something like happiness shinning out of his features – and he pulls it out with ease. The most surreal moment of her life (including the time Chris's brother publicly and violently expressed himself as the new ruler of the world) is now, as he slips his family ring onto her finger.
"Will you marry me?" He asks, as though they could possibly have a future after today, as though this will matter in the long run.
"You're asking me now? Here?" There's disbelief clear as crystal in her tone.
Something akin to new life in sparkling in his dull, jaded green eyes (something horribly like hope) and he nods.
"This is still Our Spot," He reminds her. "No matter what he has done to it."
Her lover squeezes her hands gently and repeats his request, "Marry me.", his voice soft in the evening air.
Bianca doesn't think she can breathe. She's picturing herself in a white dress, Chris waiting for her in black at the end of a long walk; she's imagining a home with just the two of them, cozy and comfy and warm; she's thinking of a swollen belly and a chance to start a new family.
She wants all of these things, she does – but the images aren't, aren't computing with how she sees herself. Bianca can't really see herself wearing this cumbersome rock to fights and skirmishes. She can't actually fit the 'supportive, loving wife' role into her life as a demon assassin/rebel soldier.
For as long as she's known what she is, she's known who she is – a badass demon chick who gets things done. There's...simply no room for something as sweet and domestic as marriage. This is simply too normal.
Bianca loves Chris though, and she does want this impossible thing. Despite herself, she gets caught up in the romance of it all.
"On one condition," She says eventually. "That you come back to me."
Because that's something that she definitely can fit into her world view; in fact, life without Chris seems equally as silly and impractical.
Chris and Bianca. Bianca and Chris. They should not be without one another, she thinks, not when they're so much better and stronger together.
"Come back to me," He laughs a little at her, like she's being ridiculous, so she reiterates. "Safely."
"Have I ever let you down before?"
Abruptly, the sun shines just a little brighter, maybe peeking out from the clouds, and Bianca is reminded of just how beautiful and wonderful this man is.
She leans in and kisses him, forgetting, in the moment, that she didn't even say the word yes.
When Bianca meets Chris for the first time, it's not a pretty sight. Her hair isn't done, her make-up is non-existent, and her blouse is torn to shreds. In fact, there's a metal pipe protruding from her abdomen and an alarming amount of blood leaking out of her.
All in all, she'll reflect later, not the greatest way to meet a guy.
At the time, however, she is trying desperately to breathe and not cry, because this feels very much like the end. If there is ever a time for tears, Bianca admits, it's on one's deathbed – but sobs will only hamper her breathing further and push her closer to death.
So she holds it all in.
There had been a fight, she thinks, but can't quite remember. There had been a fight and she'd lost but...how?
How had Bianca, super Phoenix witch, lost?
Unbidden, a little boy's cry enters her mind.
Oh.
She'd been...there'd been this assignment Wyatt had sent her on. She hates The Master with a passion that makes her blood boil, but he is Lord of All and it's the end of the world, so Bianca does what it takes to survive.
But. This assignment. He'd ordered her to kill a fire-starter, someone who, he said, could not be persuaded to their cause and would only trouble them later on.
Wyatt had not told her that the fire-starter was a child. He hadn't told her the boy was five and parent-less and crying.
Having killed hundreds of witches before, Bianca had looked down on this young one, athame in hand, and felt something disgustingly like compassion stir in her heart for the first time in years.
And...and, she thinks, lying prone on the ground, she had said no.
It's such a freeing, rebellious, hell, blasphemous thought that it makes her want to giggle as she remembers.
She had defied the Source of All Evil.
"P-probably why I'm...dying.." She murmurs, flinching at the pain speaking brings her.
Still, agonizing suffering and pending death aside, Bianca can't get the little boy's eyes from her head. She recalls kneeling before him, sheathing her dagger and her rage and becoming soft, like she'd long since forgotten how.
She recalls telling him her name (rookie mistake) and asking his (Jonah).
Mostly, though, she remembers how his small, shaking arms felt as they embraced her; how his tears were warm when they fell on her shoulder; how big his smile got when she told him she wouldn't hurt him.
"Thank you, lady." He'd whispered.
Bianca thinks of all this and doesn't regret her choice. She doesn't.
She only regrets the fact that she'll never see him again.
"Jonah, you know who sent me, don't you?"
"Yes."
"Then you know that He'll send more than me when I don't finish the job. You're going to need to run, Jonah. Now, I can shimmer you to the edge of a Safe Zone –" Safe Zones are places warded by rebels, places Wyatt's soldiers hadn't yet been able to take back. " – but you'll have to walk from there. Do you think you can do that for me?"
Sometimes Safe Zones were miles away. Still, the boy had nodded, brave through his tears.
"Y-yeah. I can walk far."
"Well then. We have no time to waste. I'd better –"
"B-but... you're going to be okay, right lady?"
She had smiled (something she hadn't done in earnest for forever), surprised, and suddenly an old endearment had slipped past her lips.
"I'm gonna be just fine, baby. I can take care of myself."
Something had possessed the boy to hug her again – and wow, two hugs in a day, it had felt like Christmas.
"Bye, Jonah. Take care."
She had winked, and then waved him far, far from here.
The battle after that...it hadn't been pretty.
Bianca feels a little better when she looks around and spots a few bodies of fellow demons; at least she took some others down with her.
Yet...she wants to know if the boy made it. She wants to work through all these new emotions that naive boy had sparked in her. She wants to...
"G-god.." She whispers. For the first time in five years, she thinks she actually... "I-I want to live."
That, more than anything, makes the tears well up in her eyes. This has to be some of Fate's best work in bitter irony - letting Bianca have this realization that she not only wants to survive but live (that is such a difference, she hadn't even known) right as she's about to lose it all.
Great. Just great.
"Hey." Someone says unexpectedly. "Hey, you. Demon Witch."
She blinks and refocuses her gaze to find a man walking towards her. No, worse than that – it's a witch, a rebel.
Great. He's probably come to torture her or mock her in her last moments.
Still...any company's better than none.
"W-what...do you want...w-witch?" She gasps, tortuously aware she can't suck in all the air she needs.
Abruptly, there are forest green eyes above her face. She tries to jerk back and quickly regrets it.
"Easy, there." He says. "I'm not going to hurt you."
That particular tone in his voice sounds suspiciously like pity, but Bianca is dying. She thinks her pride probably drained out of her with all that blood.
"Y-yeah?"
He gives her a look that's too blurry in her sight to decipher.
"I don't need to." He says quietly. "You're already dying."
"..k-know that.."
Silence reigns for a minute, more comfortable than before because Bianca knows that someone can hear her last breaths. This, maybe, is okay.
It wouldn't be the worst way to die.
"We found a boy." He tells her suddenly. "I didn't know there were any fire-starters left. But one popped up a minute ago and is saying a demon witch saved his life."
The kid made it, then. What's left of her punctured heart beats faster with relief. But what this witch is saying, it's not quite right.
"..n-not killing...a-and saving h-his life...two d-different...t-things.." She replies weakly. It's like she's ashamed of this good deed she's done.
"Yeah. Yeah, they are." He looks her in the eye, his gaze suddenly the most clear thing in her sight. "And you saved his life."
She can't think of anything to say that's worth the pain of trying to talk. She realizes she can't feel her arms or legs. That's probably bad.
"And I think I can save yours."
Bianca wants to laugh at this ludicrous situation – a sworn enemy offering to heal her.
"..c-c-atch?" She whispers.
He smiles, all sharp and cold and determined. There's a glimmer of familiarity there...she thinks she's seen that expression on someone else before.
"Join our side." He says simply.
Bianca has always been good at doing what it takes to survive. This would not be the most immoral thing she's done.
"...k-kay.." She agrees.
Then she closes her eyes and hopes for the best.
The plan has gone to hell.
Bianca is dead – well, she feels like she's dead. There's a putrid stench coming from the dangling flesh that she thinks used to be her arm and she's pretty sure the only thing preventing her from falling over is the chains around her wrists.
Honestly, Bianca wishes she were dead.
"You're a monster." She tells her torturer, thankful that at least her voice is firm, even though her legs are weak and shaking beneath her. "I can't understand why Chris would ever want to save you."
That earns her a slap to the face, his hand stinging on her already sliced cheek.
She tastes copper and spits blood out on Wyatt's feet.
"He is not saving me." Wyatt says, sighing. He looks like he's been arguing with a particularly ignorant student who keeps insisting that he's right. "He has been misled, Bianca. By you. He is simply wasting his time in a place he does not belong."
"Sure." Bianca lets her head slump onto her chest. "He is wasting his time - on a selfish bastard like you. I should've sent him back to kill you instead."
Wyatt pulls back a bloodied fist (not his blood though – never his blood) but then stops, hesitates.
Bianca doesn't like the look of his smile. It's only when he pulls only a gleaming dagger, however, glowing with runes, that she finds the energy to scream.
"We should be safe here until the museum closes. Then we'll go get the Book."
Her skin is still warm from the firey vanquish upstairs, her mind still in assassin mode as she scans the premises. But then she sees Chris on the basement stairs, his face uncertain. Her tough, killer facades melts away.
"What's the matter?"
"Nothing." He lies. He glances down and then goes for it, admitting, "It's just..sometimes I forget who you really are."
And that's not fair, Bianca thinks. That man doesn't get to peel back her layers, open up her heart again, and then stomp on it now that it's all tender.
She breathes, reminds herself that Chris is under a lot of pressure at the moment and worried as hell underneath his mask.
"Hey," She says, tugging him off the stairs and close to her. "You mean who I used to be, Chris. Before I met you."
His small, bright small is the reward for her patience.
"So...what do we do now?" He asks. In that moment, he doesn't look like the leader of a rebellion; neither does he look like a fighter or a strategist.
He looks like the person she loves, lost in his fears for the future.
This is new – usually he's the one comforting her in this relationship. Normally, he is the one to reassure her. Unfortunately for him, comfort has never been one of Bianca's strong points.
"We say goodbye." She says bluntly.
And perhaps she can't warm him with gentle words, but she knows how to soothe him with her body. So she does.
She loves him and she promises herself that this is not goodbye forever.
"We both know, Bianca, that his mission will fail."
Bianca has lost track of the days. She can no longer see clearly from one swollen eye and she's fairly certain she's lost a tooth or two.
Because of the pain and her dry throat, she finds it impossible to summon up a witty quip.
Unfortunately, Wyatt takes her silence as agreement.
"Yes, you do see – Chris cannot change what I am, Bianca, not even with all the time in the world. You should know better that anyone that people never really change."
Bianca would very much like to claw his eyes out.
"Chris will either be killed in the Past, or stay there indefinitely to try and stop the impossible – we both know how idiotically stubborn he is."
Suddenly, he looks up, smirking, and Bianca realizes she's been unconsciously rubbing her left ring finger – where her engagement ring had sat for a whopping three hours before she'd given it back.
"He's never coming home to you, Bianca." Wyatt sneers.
That hurts more than anything else he's thrown at her because this time, she can taste the truth of it.
She stares resolutely at the wall and pretends tears aren't silently streaming down her cheeks.
"But, if you do as I ask, if you go back in time and tell him the truth," Wyatt whispers, so close he has her shuddering in terror. "Tell him that it's hopeless, and bring him home? If you do that for me, you can live together. I will forgive both of you – provided that you strip his powers first, of course."
She doesn't look at him. She cannot speak; she fears what she might say in the moment.
He smiles down at her, small and sad, as though he's empathetic to her plight.
"I'll give you some time to think it over."
She wishes she didn't feel like she needed to.
When she is thirteen, she kills for the first time for her coven and doesn't eat for days afterword.
It's as though there's a sickness, a parasite inside her, infecting her with this persistent mind-numbing guilt.
"Mommy.." She says later, the childish word slipping out. "What does it feel like when you...when you kill?"
Her mother, looking so normal and motherly in her pink apron – there's even a tray of cookies in her hands – glances at her with an assassin's cold, hard eyes.
"I don't feel a thing."
"Oh." Bianca says. "Oh."
There must be something wrong with her then.
Bianca does not have a good track record of selflessness. She's spent the majority of her life looking out for herself first, others last.
It's only in the past few years – it's only because of Chris – that she's remembered how to be altruistic.
It's hard. It's so, so hard and nigh impossible when Chris is no longer here.
Delirious with pain and desperate for the company of someone safe again, someone other than the frickin' Source of All Evil, Bianca finally agrees to Wyatt's plan.
Chris's mission is doomed to fail anyway, she tells herself. What she's doing is looking out for the both of them.
Chris will understand in time. (No he won't, a part of her whispers, he's stupid and stubborn and that's why you love him)
No. No, he has to understand.
He will.
Something has died in her. She isn't sure what, yet.
When Wyatt removes her shackles, she falls to the floor and rubs at her dirty, blood-caked wrists, overwhelmingly relieved at her release.
"Get up." He is ordering. Bianca's legs won't obey her though – not after so long being limp beneath her.
With a great sigh, Wyatt stretches out a hand (she doesn't miss the disgusted look on his face, as though he'd been asked to touch a blood-sucking tick or something) and pours his power into her. Normally, white-lighters can't heal demons.
Wyatt's orbs haven't been white in a long, long time.
"Stand up." He says, pulling his hand back to brush it off on his jacket.
Now Bianca's legs straighten, new strength sustaining them. She looks down at them and blinks. Why does everything feel strange?
Wyatt continues his gloating, all but ignoring her.
"You are mine again, Bianca. You are going to do exactly as I say."
Something is wrong inside. Something was healed wrong maybe, or neglected.
"I'll do as you say." She repeats dully.
"Very good, my dear." He laughs. "Now you are going to go get cleaned up. You're going to shower and put on clean clothes – we want Chris to recognize you, yes? – and then you'll report to me for further instructions regarding going back to the Past."
She nods dutifully; this role of obeying Wyatt is familiar, if nothing else.
In the back of her mind, she can still feel the last twitches of something...something soft in her chest as it curls up and perishes. She wonders what that is and why it's leaving.
Eh. Probably nothing.
The demon-witch is already walking away on unsteady feet before the last bit of Wyatt's sentence sinks it.
She flinches, wondering if Wyatt intends to...to play with her before sending her back to the Past.
Before, when she was in Lord Wyatt's service, she wasn't a high enough lieutenant to have the 'honor' of his company. She'd been incredibly grateful at the time that that was not her hell to live.
Now, however, she is important to the Other Side. She is important to Chris.
Bianca can only hope that the cruel, sadistic bastard isn't in the mood.
The Past feels like an old sweater she's long outgrown; it's itchy and tight against her skin, reminding her of times long past.
It's...what's the word? Irrelevant. The Past is so antiquated that it's like a bad joke.
Nothing here will ever be anything than the Same. Yeah, she just got blown up by a Charmed One (that actually hurt) but it won't affect the Future.
It won't change a thing. Not in the long run.
Bianca has no words to describe just how much she hates that.
The only good thing about it is that it's predictable; it's Sameness is easily memorized. That gives her something to work with.
After injuring, nearly killing her lover, she returns to Their Spot, knowing Chris will show up sooner or later. The dead part of her explains that she used to care so much more, but her assassin nature is looking at the big picture and thinking of a better future. Just...not quite the better future Chris has in mind.
She waits for three hours. It's quiet. She tries not to think too much.
Suddenly, the sound of orbs fill the air but they're wrong, somehow. Slow. Fading.
"You know, you really shouldn't try to orb anymore." She tells him. "It could kill you." Her voice might be caviler, but this is something he needs to know. Chris can't end up dead.
The man looks up at her with pain shinning in his glassy green eyes, pain that does not stem completely from his wound.
"Is that what you want?"
Her heart does this weird pulsing thing and she covers it up with a laugh.
"If that's what I wanted, you'd already be dead."
They both know that to be truth. While Chris might be a better strategist, Bianca is better at hand-to-hand combat and killing. She can be strong and resolute where he falters.
Once, Bianca had hated that about herself.
"All I want is to bring you back, Chris." She says. To bring you home, she leaves unspoken.
The demon-witch can't help but notice that Chris won't look her in the eye.
"How'd you know I'd be here?" And that's - well, he's normally smarter than that. Bianca blames the pain.
"Same reason you knew I'd be waiting here." She says dismissively. "This is still Our Spot, isn't it?"
Chris's hand clenches in his shirt, hunched over and hurt.
"No."
She rocks back on her heels, a feeling like regret slicing through her rib-cage.
"This is what we'd hoped it would be; this is what we were trying to preserve for our future. Do you remember?" He asks, as though they didn't spend the last few years together. He stares at the ground with betrayal on his features, like he thinks she's forgotten fact that he'd asked her to marry him.
That...that future doesn't matter anymore, she thinks. Why can't he see that? The Future, the Past, it's all moot anyway, nothing can be Changed - so why can't they just give up and be together?
Wyatt can never be stopped, but he's offering them one last chance to live together and that-that is the best plan Bianca's heard in a long time.
"We were naive to think we could change anything, to stop him." There's more than a little bitterness to her tone. After all, she had wanted to stop him...
Wyatt simply couldn't be defeated.
"You don't believe that." Chris denied, finally looking at her. Whatever he sees must disappoint him, because he quickly turns away again. "Or, at least, you didn't."
Bianca thinks of his brother glaring at her in disgust and lets the beginnings of anger stir beneath her mask. These Halliwell brothers...do they both think her so beyond their versions of redemption? (that's a depressing thought)
"Well, I do now." She says.
"What happened to you, Bianca? How did he turn you back?"
You don't what to know, Chris. She thinks, shuddering inside at the memories it brings up. At the phantom pains, at the goosebumps it raises on her skin, at the shivers it sends down her spine. He used hell, she wants to explain. He used knives and swords and fists and so, so much agony and...and he used the truth.
"That's not important." She says instead, but it is.
It really, really is.
It takes so much strength to drag Chris back to the future, so much will, especially after he tosses the ring onto the table (she picked it up of course, but it means nothing if he hasn't given it to her).
I hadn't wanted that once? She wonders at herself. Now, she's hoping that she can fix this someday just to get it back. Just so one day, she can marry him.
That is going to be difficult, however, because Wyatt, the lying bastard, broke their deal. He was not supposed to hurt Chris.
Bianca didn't force her ex-fiancee back here to get him killed.
"You promised you wouldn't hurt him!" She roars at the evil witch, her anger overcoming her fear.
Wyatt is less than impressed.
"And you promised you'd turn him. Just like I'd turned you...or at least I'd thought I had."
She has no more words for that monster - instead she rushes to where Wyatt had thrown his brother. He looks dazed, but mostly unhurt.
That isn't going to last long.
"Chris, please," She says, because if this is it, if she finally screwed it all up for good, she needs him to understand. "I did not bring you here to die."
His green, green eyes meet hers, where worry and guilt are shinning through like a beacon, and he can't smile but he doesn't seem quite so angry.
"Don't worry. I know what I'm doing."
And just like that, it feels as though they're on the same side again - it feels like she never left. She can see the beginnings of a plan (probably a bad one, considering it's on the spot) turning behind Chris's clever eyes and she feels her shoulders relax the slightest bit.
"I think." He adds, and then there goes Bianca's confidence.
Standing up, he starts to charge his incredibly more powerful brother and suddenly Bianca is doubting, not necessarily the sanity of Chris (he's been mentally unstable for quite some time) but the rationality of this plan he's cooked up.
Of course, it doesn't work. Of course.
Wyatt is squeezing the life out of him and there's Chris's blood spilled on the floor. They are going to die. They are both going to die because Bianca had listened to Wyatt above Chris.
Well.
No, Bianca decides then and there. No, just one of them is going to die today. She definitely owes Chris for getting him into this mess in the first place.
Telling herself this is just another kill, just another witch with powers that can be stripped, she fights her terror and thrusts a hand through the monster's chest. She is going to stall the most powerful witch of all time.
"Whatever you're going to do, do it fast. I can't hold him for long." She tells Chris, the strain showing on her face. Then he's scrambling around, finding some spell to save the day, the stupid genius.
Bianca can't quite concentrate on anything but Wyatt, though.
It feels like when you accidentally put your finger in an electrical socket, only this is power that she can taste in her mouth, power that raises the hair on her head and makes her fingers start to singe. This much power can never be taken by someone like her, she knows.
Soon, soon he will break free and when that happens...
Wyatt is going to be hella pissed.
Out of the corner of her eye, Bianca can see the blue glimmer of the spell as it washes over Chris, giving him back what has always been his. She smiles a little, happy that one of her wrongs has already been righted.
Suddenly Wyatt is moving again, jerking from her grip as easily as if she'd been gently holding his wrist, and she is blown back from the surge of power.
Bianca flies through the air, breathless and dizzy, and wonders whether Chris will be able to escape now.
There's a sickening crunch beneath her as she lands. She still can't breathe, but for a second that's all the aches her body registers. Then she notices.
There's a chair leg sticking out of her stomach.
A chair leg. Sticking out. Of her stomach. On the edges of her vision, she catches a blond haired figure being slammed energetically into the ceiling and a familiar, brown-haired one rushing to her side.
"Bianca...no, no no...Bianca..." Chris is moaning, distraught.
She doesn't want her last sight of him to be this upset. She attempts, poorly, to lighten the mood.
"H-haven't we been here before?" She tries to joke, blinding pain searing through her ribs. Each gasp is like a dagger sliding through her stomach, but it's worth it to see him smile, however brokenly.
"Maybe we will be again." He says. There are tears in his eyes that tell her he's lying, but it's a gentle, loving lie, and it warms her in places the numbness and shock can't reach.
"Maybe." She whispers, going along with his lie. The hope vanishes, however, when he slumps over her, silent sobs wracking his body. If he can't pretend for her, Bianca knows she can't pretend for herself.
With trembling, clammy fingers, she slides the ring off of her hand and tucks it into his. There is pain and there is darkness hovering at the edges, but there are things she still needs to say.
"I-If you can...f-finish what we started.." She says, thinking of mistakes and miscommunications and a last-ditch plan she hadn't believed in. She wants to say so much more – she wants to say that she believes in him, that she knows he can change the past and save everyone (because even Bianca the demon Phoenix witch needs to believe in someone in her last moments) – but Wyatt is stirring on the far side of the room.
Bianca feels despair rise up, gurgling like blood in her throat.
They are both out of time.
"Hurry.." She tells him. "T-take the spell so he can't send anyone else."
For a moment it looks like he won't – it looks like he'll stay with her.
Honestly? A very very selfish part of Bianca is tempted to let him. The little girl inside her wants to die in somebody's arms, dammit, not alone in her worst enemy's attic, bleeding out on the floor like some sad victim.
She doesn't want to be another casualty of Wyatt's callous reign; she doesn't want to be just another ally down.
The wood sticking through her middle is something that can't be helped, though. She's a goner, but Chris doesn't have to be.
"Go." She urges him finally, the last bit of good in her resurfacing. "Go."
And, slowly, unwillingly, Chris does. He leaves.
Chris leaves her bleeding, dying on the floor with Wyatt the Evil Overlord as her only company and the only thing that can keep the bitterness of it from overwhelming her is reminding herself that this is what she wanted.
Well, no. Not this. Never this.
She'd wanted to be married. She'd wanted to be one of those dorky young newly weds with Chris, laughing and kissing all the time because they can, because they want to.
She'd wanted to have semi-normal life with the man she loved – figuring out how to cook lasagna (Chris's mom was a chef, she's sure he would've gotten the hang of it first), fighting demons together, looking for an apartment, God, even going to college.
She'd wanted that with him. All of that and more – whatever Chris wanted, too, because...because well...
"I love him." She whispers.
Bianca loves him so much that it hurts, it pains her nearly as much as the wound that's killing her.
"G-god..." She realizes. "I d-didn't even t-tell him..."
Tears slip through closed lids as her breathing gets harder and harder.
It seems so important now.
Why hadn't she said it before? Why hadn't she made sure that he knew, every single day?
He'd made sure she knew.
"BIANCA!" Someone roars nearby, someone terrifying and angry and out for blood. They can't frighten her anymore, however.
"W-hat...gonna do...k-kill me?" She gasps out. It's a hilarious joke, certainly worth five stars for all the pressure she's under.
Wyatt seems to disagree.
"You are going to regret what you have done!" He yells at her. Eh, she thinks.
That's okay; by the creeping numbness climbing her limbs, she's almost done for anyway.
Do your worst, she means to tell him, her mind far away on his brother, but the words don't seem to want to exit her mouth. I've already done mine.
Bianca doesn't want to die on a sad note, though. She pictures Chris – beautiful, loving Chris, smiling above her.
She imagines tracing his grin, imagines staring into those honest green eyes and planting a kiss on his lips.
"I love you. I love you, too, Chris. I really, really do."
When she falls asleep, finally, after what feels like years of pain, it's to the echoes of a lovers laugh.
"I know."
End A/N: So this is kind of the spiritual successor of Summer Comes, Winter Fades. The titles are both taken from the song 'Please Don't Say You Love Me' by Gabrielle Aplin but honestly, other than that, they have little to do with one another. Oh, and they're both about Bianca and Chris.
It's worth noting that if Chris seemed OCC in this a little, it's because this fic is in Bianca's POV. She sees him a little different than how he really is.
So yeah. Hoped someone enjoyed this massive drabble. It was fun to write, but in retrospective, might make less sense than I'd hoped. If you made it through all the way, I reward you with a cookie. You are amazing.
Thanks for reading!
3
Kokoro