Title: The Stone that Bleeds
Rating: T
Summary: Chris can keep them fooled for 364 days a year. But there's one day—just one—that he can't.
Disclaimer: Don't own them—or anything, really. Please don't sue!
The Stone That Bleeds
It didn't take Piper Halliwell long to realize there was something wrong with her Whitelighter.
The future had made him hard, and she could always see a sliver of his desperation at the corner of his eyelids, but today was different. Usually Chris was doing something, playing some sleight of hand to keep their attention directed where he wanted it. But today, he was still. No wisecracks, no hinting at the future like a palm-reader—just stillness.
She kept seeing him there in the peripheral of her vision. She watched as he ran callused palms over the banister, down the spine of the couch, around the edge of the dining room table. It was like he was reaching through a vision, trying to categorize what was real and what he'd made up in his head.
She tried to ignore it—she did. But Piper was a mother and an older sister, and it went against her nature to keep quiet when someone around her was upset. Besides, she recognized his silence and the look behind his eyes. She had wandered around the house looking through a vision too, after her sister died. Chris was mourning.
She put her pot down and turned the stove on, and then she sat next to him at the table.
"What's wrong?" She asked.
He looked up, but not at her; his eyes landed on her chin. "Nothing."
"Yeah, right," Piper said, and stretched her neck to catch his gaze. "What's wrong, Chris?"
"It's nothing," he said again, and stood up. He moved to the cabinets and pulled out a few seasoning salts, and before she could protest, he started shaking them into her soup. She would have scolded him, but he was adding the ingredients she had planned on using.
"Listen," Piper said, getting to her feet and walking to stand next to him. "You're not just here to help us, you know. We can help you, too. Whatever's bothering you, it might be good to talk about it."
He brushed his hands together and leaned against the counter, elbows bent. His eyes stayed on her soup. "I just hate this day."
"Did something happen today? In the future?"
His eyes went flat. "I don't want to talk about it."
She stayed silent for a second, reevaluating her approach. "The anniversary of my sister's death is always the worst for me. It's like it hits you all over again, you know? The whole day, it's like it just happened and the loss is still brand new."
"I know what you're doing. But I can't talk about it."
"Okay," she said, and turned to the fridge. Her breath misted from the cold. "I know you've got all those future consequences to worry about, but I wish you'd let me help you. I don't think you have to do this all on your own."
She pulled out a packet of butter and some fresh broccoli from the fridge, and then she reached around to grab a cutting board and a knife.
"It was my mother."
Piper let go of the knife, leaving it half-buried in a thick stem of broccoli. When she turned to face Chris, she was surprised by what she saw. Stripped down, Chris no longer looked like a soldier. He didn't look like a witch who had been to hell and back and grown claws and teeth. He just looked like a scared, sad kid who missed his mother.
"I'm sorry," Piper said. "I know what that's like."
Chris shrugged, his eyes on the tiled floor and his fingers circling around each other.
"Was it a demon?"
"No."
"An… accident?" Piper continued uncertainly. Witches were so often face with life-threatening situations. For a good witch to die in a car wreck seemed a sad, wasted fate, but Chris shook his head.
"My brother…" he began, and then stopped, like he hadn't really meant to say anything out loud.
"Yes?" Piper said. "You've already started telling, Chris."
"My brother—he thought Wyatt had the right idea. We didn't really believe he'd turn his back on us, choose Wyatt over his family, so he—he killed her. To prove it to us, and maybe himself and Wyatt, too."
Piper's body went very cold and then very hot. For Chris' mother to die by the hand of her own child—and for Wyatt to play a part, even indirectly, in the destruction of a family…
"I'm so sorry."
Chris shrugged, his eyes on the soup that sat forgotten on the stove. "Wasn't the first person I lost. Or the last."
"But she was your mother," Piper said quietly.
"And she's gone now."
"You don't have anybody, do you?" Piper asked. "Not one person, there or here."
Usually, she wouldn't get a reaction from him. He had never let her close, not once, and he was locked up tight as an asylum about his past. Talking to him was like screaming into stone—you just made yourself hoarse trying. But today, for just a moment, she saw him bleed.
"What was her name?" she asked.
He shook his head, and the crack sealed up. "I can't tell you that."
She sighed. Piper didn't feel like going hoarse today. "How about helping me with dinner?"
He looked at her and something lit up in him, and she knew she said the right thing.
"Yeah, okay."
They didn't talk much after that, besides discussing the chicken they had baking in the oven and the soup still simmering on the stove. But the more she thought about it, the more she could understand why Chris was so secretive.
She wasn't stupid about how these things worked; she knew future consequences were really a part of it. But she also knew he didn't want to depend on anyone—had maybe done that his whole life and been disappointed. She wondered if there wasn't a part of him, too, that was scared to open his world to anyone. She had lost a mother, a sister, a grandmother and a marriage to magic, and only Wyatt and her sisters kept her from locking herself in a straight jacket and never touching another being. She understood that while magic was a gift, it was also such a burden. A curse.
He bumped into her when he bent down to pull the chicken out of the oven, and she tapped him with a dishrag and said, "Watch it, mister!"
"Sorry, mom," he said, a laugh in his voice, and then he went still. The pan he was holding must have started to burn through the mitts, and he set the chicken down on the stove and closed the oven. Then he turned to her. "Sorry."
"No worries," she said, but she knew what this meant. For a moment, Chris had felt close to her. Close enough to think she was someone else—someone he'd lost a long time ago. "We'll save your mother, Chris. We'll save Wyatt, and we'll save everyone you ever knew. Please believe me."
He sprinkled some basil over the chicken. Exactly what she would have done. "Okay."
She imagined a thousand other children like Chris, a thousand boys and girls growing up in the second it takes a parent or brother or sister or aunt or uncle to be murdered. A thousand children with so much weight on shoulders that haven't filled out yet.
He must have seen her thoughts on her face, because he finally stopped moving—stopped directing attention—and looked at her. "We'll stop it," he said.
"Okay," she answered.