Author's notes: Written for the matrithon on LJ, from the prompt "Charmed, the Crone, she lives to see evil!Wyatt's reign." Thank you to my ever-helpful beta, orchida!
Biding Time
For the beings of the Underworld, vanquishing is a common threat, and easy to imagine. The consuming, fiery pain seconds before oblivion was exactly what she might have expected.
Being resurrected, on the other hand, is rare. Rare enough that it was not something she ever gave thought to (beyond occasionally wondering how that fool Barbas made such a habit of it).
Here is how it happened for her: First, oblivion. Then she is a sandstorm, dry and rough and turning, ever less chaotic, until in an instant, all the particles are drawn in, as if by an overwhelming magnetic force, and they become her self.
She is face to face with a boy. He is perhaps eleven years old and his stance is belligerent and demanding.
It is the child.
Just before the Charmed Ones vanquished her, she had held him as an infant in her arms and had been overwhelmed, in ecstasy over the power she sensed within him.
To her, that was moments ago -- but oblivion has dimmed her fervor. She knows he's not "just a boy," but in other ways he is, and she will not be at the beck and call of a child.
"What do you want?" she drawls.
She is pleased to see him rankled by her indifference. "I brought you here, Crone. I unvanquished you--"
"Yes. Why?"
He narrows his eyes. He sees this as too obvious a play for power, she thinks, but he almost seems to appreciate it, young as he is. "Fine. When I was a baby, you told my future. I wanna hear it."
"I didn't 'tell' your future, child; I'm not some common street-fair psychic. What I see, I may choose to keep to myself, or to inform those who matter."
"I matter!"
"Not yet."
He clenches his fists at his side, this boy already consumed by the forces within him. "Not yet," he spits. "That's what everybody tells me. But I'm already more powerful than them. I'm more powerful than you."
"Patience, child. I suggest you let the future unfold as it will."
"I don't want to be patient. Why can't it be now?"
"Because patience will be to your advantage. Learn to wait if you wish to come into your fullest power."
He only glowers.
"You don't understand. Maybe you never will. But I have told you all that I will right now." She purses her lips into something like a smile. "Until then, good luck."
He sees her begin to teleport away, and he runs toward her disappearing, glistening outline in a sudden fury, but she is already gone.
This Halliwell boy has to seek her out. No, he's not a boy, but just barely a man. The weak one. The one on the run.
He finds her lair deep in the Underworld, and he brings another witch -- a Phoenix. Unusual alliances have formed in resistance to the tyrant.
But the Crone does not resist. She bides her time. These two want to change that.
"We need your help," says the weaker Halliwell boy.
"This is in your best interest too, not just ours," says the Phoenix. "You can see things we can't. Tell us what's in store so we can prevent it."
"What makes you think you can prevent anything 'in store'?"
"My aunt had premonitions," the boy says.
"And she is dead."
"We know what can be seen can be changed -- that's how it works. And I don't think it works any different for you than it did for Phoebe. Whatever you see Wyatt planning, we can do our damnedest to fix."
"You can. You can spend your lives patching one hole in the roof after another while the house crumbles around you. I do not intend to be there with you when you are buried in the rubble. Your battle is hopeless."
"I don't believe you," the boy says.
"You ask me to tell you what I know. What I know is this: You will not defeat your brother. All the combined forces of your pitiful resistance cannot match his power."
"So there's nothing we can do," the Phoenix says. Anyone not the besotted boy by her side could hear the faint overlay to her voice that says she has felt this hopelessness all along.
"I did not say that."
The Halliwell boy bursts out in frustration: "You know what? If your 'premonitions' are just riddles, forget it. Stay here and rot. But don't think you won't be caught when the house crumbles, because we're all in it, and you'll be buried whether you like it or not!"
He is right. She can see that. But there is also a splintering of her sight; she can sense it in the presence of this boy, the weak one. What can it mean? She considers the possibilities.
"Raze the house," she says.
"What?"
"Level it to the foundations. Build a new one. That is your only hope of success. Beyond telling you that, I cannot -- will not -- help you." She returns to her potions. "Now, leave me."
In the end, it is she who goes to Wyatt.
She successfully steered clear of him for years. But now the weaker Halliwell boy is gone, and she can feel the cracks in the future, the hairline fractures in its weakening supports. It is time to call on Wyatt. She needs his resources. She needs his power. They need each other now.
First, he imprisons her. Of course. He lets his demon minions torture her a little, but she's known worse. He must make a show of power, to punish one who evaded his grasp for so long.
Then, at last, he is ready to listen.
"What do you have to offer me, Crone? Visions of the future?"
"No. Of the past."
Now she has his full attention. "Chris."
"Yes."
"Tell me."
"He is going to weaken you. He is stripping you of that which gives you strength."
"I know that's what he's trying to do. How long has he been gone? He's already failed."
"He will succeed."
At that, Wyatt conjures a fireball, and his arm draws back in tension, ready to hurl it, to obliterate her.
"You're not helping me, Crone."
"If you will allow me -- I know the means to defeat him."
"I already sent someone after him, and now--"
"Brutal and obvious," she sighs. "I mean a way to preserve yourself, your power, no matter what he does."
Wyatt studies her. So much strength, so many forces within him, but she can see the fear in his eyes.
"I know the ancient magic," she says. "You have the power to make it work."
When the time comes, they are not in some dark corner of the Underworld, but the well-appointed office building that Wyatt commandeered when he was consolidating his power. It once belonged to some high-powered law firm. Mortals -- they were doomed.
In the executive suite high above San Francisco, Wyatt paces while she finishes preparing the ritual.
"This better work," he says.
"It will."
"You can see it."
"Yes."
He stops to glare out the window, surveying his domain.
As she works, she asks him -- secure enough now, after these weeks of working together: "I would have thought, with all the powers you have acquired, that the sight is something you would have had for yourself by now."
His fist on the window is a gentle thump of old anger. He turns to her with a bitter grimace.
"When I was eighteen, my aunts tried to bind my powers. They failed, of course. But Phoebe? She did something on her own, something tied to her own powers. Some kind of spell -- I never figured out just what it was, but she made sure I'd never be able to get anything like her powers. No premonitions for me."
"Is that why you killed her?"
"Don't believe everything you hear. I didn't kill Phoebe -- but I did kill the demon who took her life. My family was always under my protection. Why do you think Chris has lived so long?" He gazes at the city again, at the smoke and ruins there. "It didn't matter, anyway. I didn't need Phoebe's power. I've made my own future."
"Indeed," she says, and completes her ritualistic circle with the placement of an owl feather across a sprig of thyme, positioned due north. She stands. The circle surrounds her.
"Now what?" he asks.
She gasps as it hits her. She senses the splintering; the moment has arrived.
Wyatt is alert, ready to pounce. "He did it? Time is changing?" He gives a short laugh. "And on his birthday, no less. Well, happy birthday, little brother. You won't get what you want. You underestimated my will to survive."
He moves toward her, and is thrown back by a flash of deep green light -- the shield formed by her ritualistic circle.
Her smile is as withering as it ever was in her prime, before the Charmed Ones vanquished her, when this tyrant was but an infant. She sees the dawning rage on his face as time cracks around them.
"It wouldn't be of any use if you came into the circle," she tells him. "I didn't tell you: Part of the ritual involves a potion -- one that I drank forty minutes ago."
She can just see the fireball he is raising, but he has no time. It is all crashing around them.
When time reassembles, she sees not Wyatt, not the tyrant in an office littered with occult artifacts, guarded by demons. Instead, she sees a mortal in an expensive suit, a balding, older man who stumbles to his feet in terror, dropping some sort of personal computer device, cracking its screen on the edge of his polished desk.
"Wha-- Where did you come from?"
Past him, wide windows look out on San Francisco, a city unblemished by the scars of magical war. "What year is it?" she asks.
"2027," the mortal splutters.
"And who owns this building?"
"Castle and Wieland Law."
She smiles. "Good."
She knows the truth. That boy, the weak one, succeeded. He tore the house down, and she has survived to see the new one -- with the unwitting help of Wyatt Halliwell.
She told Wyatt that he could displace this timeline's version of himself, whoever he may be in this changed reality. True, but irrelevant -- the ritual was never meant for him. She saw that in this new time, the boy Wyatt had never resurrected her. For her, there was no other self to displace. So, in this time, she thinks with satisfaction, she has resurrected herself.
The mortal is now fumbling for his phone, overcoming his terror enough to call security, she supposes.
"Don't bother," she tells him. Magic is once again shrouded from the mortal world, and this one can do her no harm, report her to no one. "Who would believe you anyway?"
She teleports away, leaving behind the mortal agape and, like so many, ignorant of what has been wrought. But she knows, and it is time to seek out haunts old and new, to understand and move into this future.
The End