Here's another little one shot. Chris drabble. I don;t like it quite as much as Apollo's gift, but it's still decent. please review and tell me your thoughts.
Disclaimer: I own nothing.
Equilibrium
teach us to care and not to care. teach us to sit still.
T.S Eliot, Ash Wednesday.
Chris sits in the attic, surrounded by the dust and the dark and the quiet. The sisters are asleep and he prefers it that way. Finds it easier; without the echoes of words not said and the shimmer of ghosts across his eyes.
He's been working for hours now, hands scrapping yellowy parchment. Tired, itchy eyes scratching over old words. The moon, wide and full, his only companion.
Now he sits idill, hands lightly clasped in his lap. He watches the sky peel back, layer by layer towards the soft glow of dawn. The books and pages are scattered around him. He does not tidy them.
He just sits, for the first time in months taking the time to be still.
Chris is a creature of movement. It's inherited, shared by all member of the Halliwell clan he's ever know. They, those bright one, are so directional, continuous and for as long as he can remember, Chris has been the same. The quest for the next thing, and the next thing a quiet drum across him.
He is reminded of Newton's first: an object in motion….
Yet, as he sits here, the stillness sliding over his skin, he wonders if life might not be better spent with less speed and more reflection. He wonders if this is where the Halliwells went wrong, flying too high and too fast.
Like Icaris, daring too close to the sun.
Time is slipping through his fingers and he doesn't know how to stop it. Never learnt has never been taught. Chris been in the past a year now. It hasn't been enough and he thinks it never will be. Fears that he might miss somehow, feels deep within his bones this goal will not be reached in his lifetime.
Chris does not want to die, but he thinks that he might know he's going to.
The thought should terrify him and it dose, it really truly dose. He's spent the last ten years clinging to survival by any means. With lies and magic, with blood and anger; bitterness. He has seen so many others fall and he is afraid. What scares him more though, is the idea of failure. Dying without success.
So Chris is terrified, but he thinks perhaps, if he saved Wyatt with his death…
No, Chris dose not want to die, not even for Wyatt. But he knows that some things are maybe worth dying for.
He knows too, all things are equal. Has been raised with the knowledge of the balance between forces; good and evil, night and day, happiness and sorrow.
He knows that changing the past this way, for the better, will enviably change something else for the worse. Something has to be lost, something has to fall.
And apparently that something is Chris.
And…here in the dark and the quiet and the stillness, he thinks he can almost accept that.
And the sky peels back towards tomorrow, and Chris, in parallel, peels back history to the truth of his brother's corruption. Feels the nearness of that knowledge and preys, not for life but absolution.
He watches Wyatt as his future shifts from darkness to light, even as he himself descends into shadow.
fin
so, please tell me what you think!