Twenty-Four.

Chapter Two

Was there ever a more horrifying sound in the world than the ringing of a phone in a house in the middle of the night? Piper was certain that there wasn't. Her eyes shot open when she heard the phone ringing out in the hallway and she sat up and glanced over at her husband who had sat up at the same time as her, his green eyes that their middle son shared with him were filled with worry and his skin had turned as pale as the sheets on their bed.

Piper threw her covers off of her and rose from the bed, running out into the hallway and she didn't need to check to see if Leo was following her as she knew that he was. She reached for the phone as soon as she was out in the hallway, bringing it up to her ear before she swallowed around the lump in her throat. "Hello?"

"Piper?" It was Phoebe's voice, and for a moment a flush of annoyance ran through Piper when she realized that considering that her sister was not her favourite person as of late as she had basically stolen her son from her, she hadn't seen her boy in almost am entire year and it had been the source of a great deal of tension within her home and her family at large as it was as none of them knew what any of them had done to drive Chris away from them, except for Phoebe, Coop, their girls and Paige's twins.

"Phoebe, what is it? What's wrong?" The silence that followed her question seemed to strech on for an eternity, and in the silence Piper noticed the sound of her eldest and her youngest joining her and her husband in the corridor, her eldest son and her daughter had seen a little more of their brother than she had in the past year but that wasn't saying much as a stranger in the street had probably seen more of her middle child who had only seen Chris for a moment across the road had probably seen more of her son than she had.

On the other side of the line, her sister made a wet noise that Piper, having known Phoebe all of her life sent alarm bells off in her mind because Piper knew that i was the noise that her younger sister would make when she had just been crying heavily and was fighting with all that she had in order to stop herself from starting to cry again. "Piper, it's Chris. He collapsed in my kitchen, he was coughing up blood and it was coming out of his nose and I don't know what's wrong with him, the doctors are still with him right now. Get to San Francisco Memorial, now."

All the air had been ripped out of her lungs and the phone slipped out of her numb fingers, it never hit the floor as Melinda froze it in mid-air and Leo picked it up and spoke to Phoebe through it while her eldest son came up behind her and rested his hands on her shoulders and turned her to face him and considering how his mouth was opening and shutting he was more than likely saying something to her but Piper couldn't hear any of it, there was just a low sort of hum in her ears.

Her mind had been cast back to twenty-four years ago, when the squirming bundle had been placed into her arms and had looked up at her with eyes that had already turned the brilliant green that she had been seeing around her home for over the past year and a half. How happy she had been, to know that her son was born and that he was going to be able to go back to a bright and beautiful future where he could be safe and happy with a brother that cared for him and would protect him.

And how it had all fallen apart when she had finally returned home and she had learned the truth. Her son was dead, even when he was still sleeping safely in her arms. He had been killed by someone that her husband had trusted, someone he had considered to be a mentor. And he hadn't been able to save him, none of them had.

And she had told herself that it didn't matter, she needed to look after her baby, both of her babies. And she had her duties as a Charmed One and as a sister to distract herself from her grief, and it was easier and easier to forget about it as her son grew and grew.

It got harder of course, when her son began to look more and more like the stranger who had come back from the horrible future to save his brother and the rest of their family and his only reward had been to be stabbed in the guy and then erased from time because the future that he had come from had never existed and thus neither had he.

She did not know if she should have thought of it as better or worse when it became clear that her son had none of the memories of his other self, it spared her and Leo from having to try and explain to their son about how an another version of himself had come back from the future in order to try and make it better, for himself, for their family, for everyone.

But it was something of a double edged sword, because it meant that her brave boy who had sacrificed everything for them was really gone and he was never going to come back to them. It mean, that she would never really be able to make for all the horrible things that she had said to him, all the horrible things that she had done including throwing him out of his own home.

She had tried, they all had. Once they had learned the truth of who exactly Chris Perry was but even back then it had never seemed to be enough, and that conclusion had only grown stronger and stronger as she had gotten older and her regrets seemed to become an even sharper knife. A reminder that she hadm't known her own son, that she hadn't trusted him and that she had treated him so terribly.

And in the end, she did need to wind up telling this Chris about the other one. Paige, who had let something slip, because of course she had, when she had been babysitting the boys for her, when Chris had still been a child which had caused both him and Wyatt to start asking questions and in the end she had no choice but to tell them something, she did not think that she would be able to look into Chris's eyes again if she didn't.

So she had told them a story, a fairytale. Of an older brother who had been trapped and made powerless by evil, a trap laid so long ago in the past that none of them had seen it coming, of a brave little brother who would never give up on his brother and so travelled back into the past to stop the trap from ever being laid in the first place.

It had been a happy middle ground, she had told them something about the other Chris while avoiding all of the pain and death that had come with. It had taken all that she had not to burst into tears when her younger son had asked her if that meant that one day, he would need to travel back from the future as well to save Wyatt again.

She had explained that he wouldn't need to, because the reason that he had needed to travel back into the past had never happened now which meant that the future that he had came from never existed and thus that version of Chris had never existed either.

Chris, her little peanut, who had been sitting up in his bed when she told him this, had gotten this serious frown on his face and his eyes had narrowed and it was like both his other self and Prue had clawed their ways back from the void in order to haunt her and he had spoke just a few words, but they were enough to make her heart shatter into a million pieces. "That's sad, Mommy."

Piper had nodded and agreed that it was before quickly tucking both of her boys back in, giving the both of them a kiss on the forehead, before she got up and fled from the bedroom before either of her sons could see her cry. She only let the first tears fall when she was safely back in her bedroom with her husband where she proceded to bawl into Leo's chest.

As her sons got older they both became more and more curious about the story, ironically enough it was on the morning of her younger son's fourteenth birthday when the other version of her had died, which she had learned later on from her own Father around the time that Chris was five, that she had finally given in and told the both of them the truth of it.

It had been...a lot. The party had needed to be cancelled, none of them had really felt like celebrating.

In the days following it, Wyatt had fallen into a severe depression from leaning that he had in one version of reality not only been evil, but he had been the Source of All Evil itself and he had destoryed the world and that a version of his little brother had to die and be wiped from existence in order to set things right again.

It had been awful to see, it had been awful to live with. Wyatt had always worn his heart on his sleeve and that heart was just so large, he felt so much that more than once Piper had given thanks that her eldest had never been an Empath as she was fairly certain that Wyatt would not only destory himself from all of the feeling, but also the city as well.

She and Leo had been so busy trying to make sure that Wyatt didn't fall apart and rasing Melinda as best as they could that Chris had just sort of, slipped through the cracks. They had never meant for that to happen, Leo certainly had not meant for it to happen considering how important it was to him that he had a good relationship with all of his child but even more so with Chris, but it just kind of wound up happening.

Chris drifted away from them, and life went on. Wyatt got better but Piper still kept as close an eye on him as she could, she was very glad that she had managed to convince him to move back into the Manor, and demons still attacked but they deal with them. They went to work and celebrated birthdays, poor Chris's always seemed to never quiet work out the way that they should, and they all just kept living.

Her youngest son had been distant, and both she and Leo had noticed that. And they had made a promise to themselves that they were going to do something about that, Chris's twenty-third birthday was coming up after all. First thing that they had agreed on was that it was not going to be cancelled, no way in hell. The only way that they would even consider doing that would be if the Source, Zankou, Hecate, Shax and every demon and warlock that they had ever dealt with all came back and attacked all at once and even then that would only be enough to make them consider a delay.

And it had worked out so well, everyone had arrived at the manor early in the morning and all of them had hidden as they waited for Chris to get up with the intent to surprise him. Okay, that probably wasn't the smartest idea that she had ever had as they had kinda been conditioned to respond to any sudden movement with using their powers so she really should have forseen what would happen.

But, once Henry was healed and a phone call had been placed to make an appointment to the doors in the sunroom repaired, the rest of the day had been basically perfect. She had made all of Chris's favourites and the look on his face when he had seen the spread that she prepared for him was probably going to be one of her favourite memories of her kids, Chris featured far too fewly in those and she was going to make sure that changed.

It had been in the afternoon and most of the family had moved out into the backyard and Piper had gone into the kitchen to make sure that the cake was doing okay, Chris's favourite of course. Banana cake with mocha frosting with candied peanuts as a topping, it was a bit heavy for Piper's tastes but it was Chris's day and she would make him whatever he wanted today.

She had been just looking at it when Leo had walked into the kitchen, she didn't need to turn and look to see that it was him. He was her husband and living with him as long as she had done, well, it gave you a different kind of magic. And it was one that she would trade for anything in the world.

She had gotten to her feet and was about to tease him and ask him what he was doing in there with her instead of being outside with everyone else, the cake did take a while to cook so they probably wouldn't notice if they decided to slip upstairs and into the shower for a couple of minutes or so but the look on her husband's face put an end to that. The last time that she had seen him look like that was years and years ago, during the dark time after the other Chris's death.

She had seen a lot of terrible things in her time as a witch, innocents that she had failed to save, their broken bodies on the ground from energy balls or fire balls, Mark Chao's burned body in the middle of the alleyway as his spirit looked at his own body with wide eyes. But even with all of those horrible things that had happened, the state that Leo was in during all of that mess had scared her more than anything else.

They had both sat at the kitchen island and Leo told her what was worrying him, Chris had died when he was twenty-three in the past? What if he somehow got all of his memories back from the other timeline, what if his other self actually came forward and merged with the other Chris? What would they do if that actually happened, how would they explain it to Chris, what if the other version of their son came back?

So, while the party carried on for the rest of the day neither Piper nor Leo could find themselves enjoying it, it was like a sword was hanging over their heads and any moment it was going to come crashing down on them. When midnight finally arrived and the old clock in the hallway sounded out for all to hear, Piper was so happy that her son was still her son.

But all the same, she wouldn't be able to deny that a small part of her was sad that her son hadn't got his memories back, that the other Chris's soul hadn't come forward to merge with this Chris so that at she could have had both versions of her son. But, she guessed that wasn't the way that it was meant to be.

And after the party, despite their best efforts, the slight distance that had formed between Chris and them had turned into a chasm. It had been a year since the party and she hadn't seen Chris since and each day that passed without seeing him was like another knife being shoved into her chest, she knew where he was of course, he was with his Aunt Phoebe who he had basically moved in with and that had not done much to help her mood either.

She had hoped that he would come over for his twenty-forth birthday, she and Leo had saved up to get him an, in her view, frankly amazing present but nope. He had sent her a text, didn't even bother to call her, and that was it. He was going to spend his birthday with his Aunt Phoebe, his Uncle Coop and his cousins.

Yeah, she might have lashed out with her power after she had read that and caused all of the plates in the kitchen to shatter.

And now, her son was in the hospital and she had none nothing about it. He could be hurt, he could be dying and she wasn't the first to know. How could she have let this happen, she should have gone to him. She should have made him talk to her, he was her boy and whatever had caused this distance between them shouldn't have matter, she should have tried to fix it.

She was going to fix it, he was going to be fine and she was going to fix it.

Leo swallowing roughly brought her out of her miserable thoughts and she looked at her husband as he placed the phone back down, turning to face them his eyes were red. "Wyatt, Melinda. You both need to go and get dressed and you need to do it quickly. Your brother's in the hospital, we need to get there as quickly as we can."

Both of their other children didn't need to hear much more than that, as they ran back into their rooms. Piper stepped towards Leo and soon enough she found his arms wrapping around her and his face being buried into her neck. "I can't lose him again, Piper. I can't, if he dies. It'll kill me, I know it will."

Piper didn't know what to say, so instead she simply stood there stroking his hair as they waited for their other children.

End of Chapter Two.

Another chapter done.

This was going to be longer and would have seen the Halliwells getting to the hospital and speaking to Chris, but I decided to make that the next chapter and have it be from Leo's perspective.

Anywho, I hope you enjoyed this chapter and I hope you will consider leaving a favourite, a follow and a review.

With much love,

DiscordantSymphony