Victor was two years old when his power activated. He had a loving, if dysfunctional family, an older sister who adored him and a whitelighter. He was happy.
Victor was five when he used his power to kill someone. He laughed as the scary man burst into flames.
Victor was nineteen when his sister snapped, killed his whitelighter, and tried to steal his powers.
He was still nineteen when he ran away from home, changed his name from Miller to Benett and (stupidly) bound his powers. He wanted to remake himself into someone new and good and better than him.
Victor met a nice, normal girl. She was beautiful, smart and funny. They just clicked. Of course, she had to help her mom a lot. Victor got it until he met the mom in question, she was a formidable middle-aged woman. Victor got a bad feeling about all the emergencies, but he was in love and put it aside.
"I need to tell you something," Patty said, determined. It was a sunny day and they were sitting in the conservatory in the Halliwell Manor. Victor used to live in a house like this. It was filled with bad memories.
"What?" Victor asked, dread pooling in his stomach.
"I'm pregnant," Patty said. Victor was flooded with relief.
"Really?"
"Yes," Patty said happily.
"I need to tell you something," Patty said, determined. Just one week after the pregnancy announcement, it felt like deja vu. Victor briefly wondered if he'd gotten stuck in a time loop again, but discarded the idea as ridiculous.
"Do you feel the deja vu?" Victor asked.
"Yeah, and I should've said something before, but I need to tell you now, so…"
"What?" Victor asked, dread pooling in his stomach.
"I'mawitch," Patty blurted. Victor couldn't help it, he laughed. It was a big, deep and nervous laugh. Maybe she would find out about his sister? His power? The good match they were in regards to their child's magical powers?
"Don't laugh, Vic, I'm serious," she said. "Watch."
Victor stayed.
No one from Victor's side of the family came for the wedding. He talked with Patty about the bad blood between them, but left out the part where his sister killed his whitelighter and he killed his sister and all his mom did was shake her head. Patty understood.
Then came Prue, and Piper, and lastly Phoebe. They were all magical, but Victor thanked his lucky stars that none of them got his power. They were all Halliwell, they were all good.
Like most children with demonic relatives, Victor had a healthy fear of the ice cream man. Patty had laughed at him when he told her about his deep phobia of the ice cream man, and Victor couldn't tell her that she would too if her dad had made a graphic play about what would happen if you went to the ice cream truck.
Patty was the one who bought the girls ice cream from the ice cream man, while Victor remained at a safe distance. He wasn't a demon, but who knew, he was related to several. And he was a murderer. After that it was Penny who bought the girls ice cream. She looked at him when he told her, and he lied and made up some story about spiders. Maybe she knew, but she needed to be sure, didn't she, and anyway, something happened before.
Prue was six when she was taken by the ice cream man. Victor saw it. His powers were bound, his demon blood low and he was an adult. He went and rescued her, and afterwards he saw something like grudging respect in Penny's eyes. He was just happy his daughter hadn't been eaten by the Nothing.
Victor left.
Victor tried to steal the Book of Shadows because he didn't want his daughters to have the responsibility of being good all the time, of having demons go after them, of having their lives destroyed by magic.
They were understandably mad, but maybe they would've understood better if he told them about himself. He didn't, because he wanted to keep his secret, he wanted to be Victor Bennett.
It was a job interview.
"Use four adjectives to describe yourself."
"Smart, driven, social and funny," Victor Bennett replied.
Rude, hypocritical, secretive and a coward, Victor Miller thought.
What Victor didn't know was that what happened with his whitelighter had become a cautionary tale. You didn't give witches with demonic relatives whitelighters. It wouldn't work out.
Upon hearing the tale from Leo, the Charmed Ones were horrified. First, the whitelighter had been slowly killed. Then the murderer had been slowly killed by the whitelighter's charge. No one knew where the charge was now, but he had a power special to his family. He was the only one presumably alive to have this power. The Elders hoped that the power would die out. Of course, then the Charmed Ones wondered what this power was. Crystalization, Leo had answered. What was so bad about that the Charmed Ones wondered. Everything becomes a weapon, Leo had answered.
Victor doesn't like whitelighters. It starts out slowly, some small resentment towards Patty's whitelighter even though really, he's a decent guy. There's still something rubbing Victor wrong.
When it turns out that Patty's been having an affair with her whitelighter, he figures that that's it. He, on some subconscious level, knew that the whitelighter was lying to him.
He doesn't like Leo either. He doesn't believe the crap that fathers should like their daughters' husbands, it's just misogynistic and backwards to think of your daughters as a possession, but there's something about Leo that rubs him wrong.
Of course, Leo grows on him. He's getting over it.
Or so he thinks.
He unbounds his powers as he grows older, and then a whitelighter turns up. They didn't give a crap between him being nineteen and now, but as soon as you have a power you're suddenly a commodity.
The whitelighter is never found and Victor goes to the Underworld and gets an enchantment to hide himself from witches. Hopefully no one will ever find out. Really, it's their own fault.
As Victor grew older and got more involved in his daughters' lives, in the magical world, he unbound his power and started practicing again. He had moved past the guilt of his youth, and really, it would be good to be able to defend himself.
An opportunity arose when Wyatt was ten, and Chris a bit younger. They had had their powers taken, and Victor was babysitting them at the manor. They were in their rooms, while Victor sat in the living room. Of course that was where the demon appeared. And Victor had practiced, so it was quick. Painless. If you hit the right artery it was a matter of seconds. Victor had a very good knowledge of anatomy, courtesy of his father. (He used to charge 20 000 dollars a kill.)
Victor was very grateful that Wyatt had as many powers as he did, because that meant that his daughters never bothered to find out the history of a new one. They never bothered to find out exactly what it was, either. Funny enough, the power that Wyatt got on his twentieth birthday, was one that they should have researched about.
It was the power of crystalization, and it was the signature power of Victor's family. What that meant was that demons, at the first sign of it, tried to shimmer out of the dimension. They had heard too much about the Millers, both the good and the evil branch, to be able to muster up the idiocy required to stay.
Leo should've known better, having known all about the whitelighter, the charge and the charge's sister. But memory become worse with age, and Leo, despite appearances, was quite old. He didn't remember that crystalization wasn't just creating magical glass out of thin air, but you could create anything. Gems, for example. Wyatt used the power for parlor tricks. He had so many, after all.
Victor was seventy-four years old. He had creaky limbs, a secret and a family who loved him. It was all he had wished for when he was younger. What he didn't know when he was nineteen was that it would take so long to get here.
"You're looking old," Penny told him. She had been summoned as a ghost for help with the latest magical crisis, along with Patty.
"Mom," Patty said and looked sideways at her mother.
"Nah, she's right," Victor said. "But it's nice. I'm retired. I spend a lot of time with my grandchildren. My mom died a week ago. Life couldn't be better."
What is the one thing you should never say? What Victor just said.
Two warlocks blinked into the room. Victor wasn't all that surprised when he recognized one of them. The more involved he got with his daughters' lives, the more denizens of the underworld he saw, and the more family members he saw.
The Millers were morally ambiguous. They were famous for it, after all. In a world of black and white, they were grey. As Victor had learned during his childhood, it was a dark grey.
"Vic?" one of the warlocks said in astonishment. Victor couldn't help his instinctual gut reaction, now that he had been using his powers for the last ten years. The warlock took a step forward, and then there was a jagged piece of crystal in his gut. He fell over. The other warlock didn't have time to blink out before his head got cut off.
As soon as Victor has dispatched the warlocks, he was flung into a wall.
"Who are you and what have you done with Victor?" Patty asked.
"Nothing, nothing!" Victor said.
"Really? Because you just vanquished those warlocks, Victor," Patty said.
"Have you heard of the Millers?" Victor asked.
"Aren't they-" Patty started.
"The demons?" Penny asked, incredulous.
"And witches," Victor reminded. "They're my family, some things happened which you already know about, and I left. I haven't lied to you."
"Really?" Penny huffed.
"You hate magic!" Patty exclaimed. "You tried to steal the Book of Shadows so that our daughters wouldn't be witches! And you haven't lied?"
"I don't like magic and I don't like whitelighters. It's just that, occasionally, it's useful," Victor said.
The part of his family that was alive didn't react that well either.
Victor was 94 when he died. He'd lived a long and happy life.