A Charmed Meeting

Summary: I adore Charmed but I think the creators overlooked the importance of Victor being introduced to Paige. Before Season 5's The Day The Magic Died, there is no evidence of Victor having met Paige but he is suddenly all friendly and fatherly when he introduces her and Phoebe to his new wife. So, this is my take on it.

He looked at the tall, young, raven-haired girl before him disbelievingly. She was beautiful. Paige stood there with her back ramrod straight and slowly relaxed. Despite the change in posture that gave away her nervousness and vulnerability, there was a glint of determination in her eyes. She was like his recently deceased daughter in so many ways, except one: She wasn't his.

No, she was the physical reminder of his wife's affair with that damn whitelighter. He knew he shouldn't have given Patty some space when she asked for it, shortly after Phoebe's disastrous first birthday party. But Victor hadn't wanted to cause either of them further distress and so he accepted yet another business trip to keep the peace.

Before he knew it more than a year had passed and when he returned, Patty served him with divorce papers. She'd been slightly overweight and very emotional at the time but he thought it was the stress of raising three kids on her own. Now he knew better, she'd probably just given birth to Paige and soon after given her away.

As angry as he is at the betrayal, the thought of what Patty must have gone through at losing her child made his heart hurt. He knew a thing or two now about that kind of loss. Prue's funeral and being unable to help the girls with avenging her death hurt him more than he was willing to admit.

"Umm,Dad?,asked Piper, are you ok?".

His daughter's voice broke him out of his reverie and he focused his attention back to the present situation. Phoebe and Piper had called him two weeks ago to tell him about Paige and invite him to meet their newly discovered sister.

With all of the chaos that had ensued after Prue's funeral and having to rescue Paige from a similar fate, there hadn't been time for awkward introductions and he understood why. Telling your father that your mother, his ex-wife whom he still loved, had had a forbidden child with her whitelighter wasn't an easy thing to do.

Paige stepped forward from where she'd been standing next to Phoebe in the foyer and put out her hand in greeting.

"Hi Mr Bennett,I'm Paige, your... um... your...just Paige."

Then she stepped back, feeling like an idiot and wishing she hadn't agreed to this stupid meeting. Discovering you and your sisters were witches and meeting your dead mother (she still wasn't quite sure how that worked) was one thing but meeting your siblings' father when he was clearly still reeling from the affair that created you was quite another.

Victor saw the look of insecurity on Paige's face and his heart went out to her. She couldn't be blamed for what her parents had done, and in another life or world, she could have been his daughter too. She was young, new to the craziness of the Halliwell family (of which he had plenty of experience) and she could probably use a father figure. From what he'd heard, her adoptive parents were dead and Sam had long ago joined the angels in heaven.

They wouldn't ever be father and daughter in the strictest sense of the words; he knew that but for better or worse, they were family now and he would do his best to make sure they stayed that way.

So he did the only thing he could do: he walked over to Paige, wrapped her in his arms and said:

"Call me Victor and welcome to the family, Paige."

The End