Manunkind

by avocadomoon

listen: there's a hell of a good universe next door; let's go

1. Chapter 1

No. You were trying to get yourself killed, which is what this family does best - get killed. Isn't it obvious by now that our only destiny is to die?"

Charmed Again, Part I

---

He looked so different, was Piper's first thought. He was taller - though of course he was taller, this version of her son was much older, at least thirty at first glance, if not older - but still somehow it took her aback. The Chris from years ago, the one she'd lost - he'd only had a few inches on her, tops. But this version - this Chris, standing in her living room, squinting at her suspiciously like she was a demon - was at least six feet tall.

His face seemed different too - his jawline was more pronounced, though that could've just been the beard that made it seem that way. And he had a very dark tan. Much darker than her own son's was - it looked like this Chris had spent most of his life outside. There were tiny lines around his eyes - laugh lines, frown lines. His face looked almost gaunt, like he hadn't eaten in months.

"Let's calm down," Phoebe said. "We didn't do this on purpose, okay? Nobody did this to you on purpose. And we can send you back, but you need to let us figure out what happened first - "

"I know what happened," Chris said. This other Chris. A stranger version of Chris. "I know exactly what happened, I told you what happened. Your daughter summoned me, and then destroyed the circle, which means I'm now trapped here, unless we can find a path back to my universe. Which also trapped your Chris in mine, by the way," he finished sharply, looking up at Piper. She found herself breathless, beneath his sharp, angry gaze. "Did I mention that enough times for you to get it? Your son is in my universe." He looked around and scoffed. "I really doubt he's prepared for what he just walked into."

"Hey," Phoebe said, glancing worriedly at Piper, "let's not freak out just yet, okay? And we don't need to play the blame game, mister - PJ was just trying to help - "

"Help with what?!" Chris said incredulously. Behind him, a light bulb in the hallway popped, spraying glass across the carpet. Piper flinched, but nobody else seemed to even notice. "What could bringing me here and then stranding me possibly help with?!"

"Chris was having nightmares," Piper heard herself say. She flinched again when Phoebe and the other Chris turned to look at her - one look being exponentially more friendly than the other. "He was...they were more like visions, really. They were keeping him up at night - PJ found a spell that she thought was a vision quest, they were trying to figure out where they were coming from - find a way to stop them - "

"They didn't tell us," Phoebe said, glancing over her shoulder at the kids, who were huddled together in the observatory. They'd cast a silencing spell so they couldn't eavesdrop, but it didn't look like PJ and Wyatt were particularly interested anyway - PJ was obviously still upset, hunched over on the couch. And Wyatt was just staring at them, his face stricken.

The other Chris didn't follow their gaze. "Messing around with things they didn't understand," he said dismissively. "At the very least, she should've known not to release a circle before she knew what the fuck it was she did. I mean, how old is she, and she doesn't know that yet? What the hell have you even been teaching her?"

"Hey," Phoebe said sharply, a bit more angrily than before.

"No," Chris replied, just as angry. "No. Do you have any idea - " he stopped mid-sentence, taking a deep breath. His hands were visibly shaking, he was so angry. Piper could feel the suppressed emotion coming off of him in waves - the same sort of energy that demons gave off, when they'd get really pissed off. She and Phoebe exchanged wary glances, taking a step back from in tandem, which only seemed to irritate him more. "Oh, for fuck's sake. I'm not going to attack you."

"Then maybe cool it with the vibes, buddy!" Phoebe said, incredulous. Another light bulb in the hallway popped. "Everyone just needs to calm down - we're not gonna get anything accomplished when we're upset - "

"You don't get it, do you?" Piper couldn't stop thinking of him as a stranger, even though he was clearly her son - a version of her son. But it wasn't just the physical changes that were so disconcerting - it was his presence, the expression on his face, even the way he talked. His accent sounded different somehow, though Piper couldn't really say what exactly was different - and he seemed more intimidating, colder. It reminded her of the times that she'd met evil versions of herself and her sisters - though they'd already seen him orb, so they knew he wasn't a version of Chris who'd turned. That didn't mean he was good, though. Just because you weren't evil didn't make you a good person. "There are millions of universes, Phoebe. Billions. To find my specific one again - " he cut himself off again, closing his eyes briefly as he seemed to struggle for words. Or control. "Releasing the circle means she cut off the connection she formed between our two worlds. Finding it again is going to be…extremely difficult."

Piper felt her heart drop into her stomach, chilled more by the tone in his voice than by his words. "We'll find it," she said, adopting her 'Prue voice' - the one she used when she was scared. "There's no other option. We'll figure it out."

"You have the Power of Three here?" Chris scanned the room quickly, like a soldier. His shoulders were still tense, and he avoided the doorway into the conservatory - where Wyatt was still plainly visible.

"Yes - you don't?" Phoebe asked.

Chris didn't answer. "We'll need a necromancer, and someone who knows enough about quantum computing to help us narrow it down. I assume PJdoesn't have many astrophysicist friends?"

Phoebe frowned again, looking offended, but Piper cut her off before this could get any worse. "We'll figure it out," she said again, her voice sounding on the edge of desperate even to her own ears. It was sinking in, finally - the fact that her Chris was gone. Gone, sucked into a summoning circle, dumped out into a world of who-knows-what. Not a pleasant universe, judging by the clothes this Chris was wearing - patched together, sewn together, dirt ground into the fabric. His hands were scarred at the knuckles, and everything about him looked worn in and worn down - even his jacket, which was the newest looking part of his outfit, looked like it'd been through a war.

He probably has, Piper thought with a chill. She couldn't let Wyatt talk to this person for too long. She couldn't risk it.

"Let's hope so," Chris snapped. "For my sake and your son's."

"Okay," Phoebe said briskly, clearly still pissed off, "let's cut the attitude, okay? It was a mistake, it happened - we'll figure it out, but you're not helping by being a jackass."

"Oh, I'm sorry," Chris snapped, cutting the words into the air cruelly, "I tend to get a little touchy when I get kidnapped by an alternate universe."

"Nobody kidnapped you," Piper said numbly. "It wasn't - it wasn't deliberate. It was a mistake."

"I have a family back there," Chris continued, as if she hadn't even spoken. His face was dark with anger - Piper had never seen such fury in her son before. In any version of her son. "People who count on me. People who are going to miss me. People who depend on me to survive. What the fuck am I supposed to - " Another abrupt stop, and another light bulb in the hallway, giving up the dust. Phoebe took a wary step closer, her shoulder hitting Piper's. Forming a line of defense, between this strange, angry Chris, and their children - still watching from the other side of a spell in the other room. "I need to go. I need to get the fuck out of here."

"Clearly," Phoebe snapped. Her face was troubled, though.

"What's - " Chris broke off again, finally turning his head to look at Wyatt. His face was pale, wracked with pain, and Piper thought: oh. "Never mind."

"It's normal," Piper said, choking the words out through a thick throat. She felt Phoebe's arm come up around her back - helping keep her upright. "He's normal. We stopped it here. You stopped it."

Chris didn't seem to be listening. "I can't be here right now." He seemed to be talking mostly to himself. Reaching up, he laid one shaking hand against his forehead, shooting another haunted look at Piper, his face still frozen with some unknowable pain. "I'll be in touch."

"Don't go far," Phoebe said sternly, but the words were lost to his orbs - which also seemed different, somehow. Usually when her husband or her sons orbed in and out of a room, it felt like a gentle shower of scented water - like running through a sprinkler when she was a kid, a gentle tingle against her magical senses that was always like a breath of fresh air. This Chris, though - his orbs were a darker blue, and the sensation they left behind was anything but pleasant. Piper found herself breathless again - as if all the air had suddenly been sucked out of the room. He'd taken all the oxygen with him, when he went.

"Honey. Honey, deep breaths," Phoebe was saying. Her voice sounded faraway at first, and then Piper blinked, and realized she was sitting down - her legs crumpled beneath her, Phoebe's hands squeezing her wrists tightly. Over her sister's shoulder was her son - standing in the doorway, still on the other side of the silencing spell, but clearly yelling something, looking frantic with worry. "Piper, sweetie, you're hyperventilating. Try to breathe slowly - should I call Leo? Oh my God - "

"I'm fine," Piper said with a gasp, "I'm fine." She waved her hand at Wyatt, trying to get him to calm down, but he just glared back at her, his arms crossed. "Oh God, Phoebe. That was Chris."

Phoebe knelt next to her and hugged her fiercely. Piper leaned into the circle of her arms, and closed her eyes, and thought: not again. Please, please, please not again.

"That was a version of Chris, yeah," Phoebe whispered, "and our Chris is still out there. It was just a mistake, right? Just a spell gone wrong. We've faced worse, we've all lived through worse. Don't panic - we're gonna fix this."

We'll fix it, we'll fix it, Piper thought. Over Phoebe's shoulder, Wyatt was staring at her, his eyes wide. We'll fix it, she tried to say. But the words didn't come out.

---

Chris had only told her about them - the nightmares - at the last possible second, because as usual he kept everything to himself until he was absolutely backed into the corner. Usually the person backing him up was Wyatt, and Piper herself did her part as the corner. They had it down to a system.

"Wyatt said you woke up screaming again," she said. Chris twitched and avoided her gaze, locking his eyes on the kitchen counter instead. But Piper was used to that. "Chris, honey. If something happened to you - "

"Jeez, Mom," he said, twitching again.

" - if somebody is hurting you, then you need to tell me. There's no shame in this kitchen. Only acceptance, and love." She reached out and placed her hands on his shoulders, ignoring his deep, full-body cringe. "Is someone bad-touching you, son?"

"I hate you," Chris said, pushing her hands away. She glimpsed part of a grin, hastily wiped away with a shake of his head. She smirked at him, triumphant, and he rolled his eyes. "They're just dreams. It's nothing."

"Okay, for real now," Piper said, sliding onto a stool. "Waking up screaming is not nothing. Talk to me."

"We all have nightmares. You have nightmares," Chris said, just this side of defensive.

"I have the weirdest, most complex case of PTSD the world has ever seen," Piper agreed. "Yes, this is true. I have nightmares. But you know how I deal with nightmares? I talk to your dad about them. Or the aunts. And I cry, and get massages, and I deal with them, Chris. I don't pretend they don't exist."

Chris looked sullen. "That's not what I'm doing."

"Oh, sure. I definitely believe you."

Chris sighed, and Piper could see the exact moment when he gave in - he always had the same look on his face. The annoyed ugh, Mom look that seemed absolutely universal - regardless of timeline. "It's...a vision. Visions. They come at night when I sleep."

Piper was instantly alarmed. "You're not precognitive."

"No, but I know they're real." Chris looked firm - centered in the truth of what he was saying. He never said or did anything that he wasn't sure about - even when he was little. Every action was deliberate. "I think it might be from...you know. The other me. The one who died."

Piper swore she felt her heart stop for a second. But she was used to that.

It wasn't a surprise so much that he'd been hiding it - eventually he confessed that they'd started almost three years before, and it was only recently that Wyatt had found out - but Piper did want to punch herself in the face for not putting the pieces together. Three years - that's when Chris dropped all those classes, and abruptly gave up on his college plans to study at Magic School instead. And two years ago was when he started dating - determinedly, taking out girl after girl after girl with a focused intent that was frankly a little weird, never actually settling down into dating just one. He was experimenting, Paige said. He's only sixteen - he'll figure it out. Maybe he's questioning, maybe he's attracted to men and he's trying to talk himself out of it, or maybe he got his heart broken - we don't know, and he won't tell you if you push. Just keep an open mind and be there for him.

Well, Piper had tried. She always tried to do those two things, at least - but Chris hadn't told her anything. He just kept taking out those girls - literally anyone, he wasn't choosy - and Piper would eavesdrop on their conversations sometimes, standing at that spot in the kitchen where you could hear whoever was on the porch through the open window, and the way that he talked to them - that smooth, practiced flirting, the noncommittal answers, the charming way he'd talk them out of being angry, and then drop them the very next day - it worried her.

"What's the worst that could happen? He turns into a bit of a player?" Phoebe always brushed it off. She always thought that Piper's anxiety was an overreaction, which Piper would get really offended by if she didn't do the same thing to Phoebe - they kept each other's neuroticisms balanced, that way. "He's a teenage boy. Come on, Piper. Relax a little. He's allowed to be a jerk sometimes. He'll figure it out - he's a good person."

Right. Piper knew that. Still, it was such an abrupt change - she should've known. She should've figured out that something else was going on.

"He's older," Chris told her. "He has a wife. I don't know her name - most of the visions I get of her are…" he cleared his throat. "Well."

"God," Piper muttered. Figures. "What else?"

"It's definitely the old timeline," Chris said. "The one he erased, when he came back. Sometimes I get them when he's outside, and the landscape is always...apocalyptic. There's like, ruins of buildings everywhere, but the people just sort of...live among it all. There was one I had where he was at some kind of...barbecue? There were a bunch of whitelighters and witches hanging around in this big park, and right there in the middle was a building that had been destroyed by some kind of explosion. There were kids just climbing all over the rubble like it was a jungle gym." Chris shook his head. "The air always smells like sulfur. Like...when a potion goes wrong. It's like his whole world smells like that."

Piper took a deep breath. "What about the ones that make you scream, sweetheart?"

Chris' face darkened. "I don't wanna talk about those. No offense." He looked faintly ill. "He...he had a really rough time when he was a kid."

Piper felt pretty sick herself, reaching out her arms to hug him. He indulged her for longer than he usually did, which spoke volumes to his emotional state. Usually he was all hands off - another thing that had started a few years before. Piper really wanted to punch herself.

Wyatt and Chris both knew better than to use magic for personal gain, but PJ...PJ was a different story. Piper loved her to death, but she had Phoebe's recklessness combined with Coop's rock-solid assurance that she was always doing the right thing, which often became a dangerous combination. Even when she was little, she lived up as Prue's namesake in that sense - always rushing forward, damn the consequences. And she was charming, too - cute and convincing enough that she could get Wyatt and Chris into trouble, just because they all had a tendency to indulge her.

"I didn't know," PJ said, babbling desperately from the circle of Phoebe's arms. Piper's own arms ached to hug her too, but they were too busy with Wyatt - vibrating with tension, on the edge of either a panic attack or an explosion, Piper kept her hands firmly on his shoulders, leaning hard just to keep him in his seat. "I didn't know - Chris checked my incantation, he thought it would work - it wasn't supposed to suck him in like that - "

"Shh," Phoebe said, stroking her hair. "It wasn't your fault. It was an accident, okay? Look at me. Say it."

"It was an accident," PJ said faintly. Wyatt twitched beneath Piper's hands, shaking his head at the floor.

"You still have the spell, right?" Piper felt fairly numb still, her earlier panic now faded into a filtered sort of horror. It was like she was looking at her own fear through a window. "You wrote it down? Including the ingredients?"

"Of course," PJ said.

"Then we'll fix it," Piper said. If she said it enough times, maybe it'll get more convincing.

"Who was that?" Wyatt asked. "That other Chris. It was the one from the original timeline, right? Instead of getting rid of the visions, the spell somehow summoned him."

"It was," Phoebe said carefully, making grim eye contact with Piper, "a version of your brother, yes."

"But how is that possible? You said that he died," Wyatt said. He turned to look at Piper. "He was killed by Gideon nineteen years ago."

"The visions Chris was having weren't only from our original timeline," Piper said quietly. Both PJ and Wyatt both snapped her heads around to look at each other, eyes wide. "The details didn't always match up. We think he was probably seeing glimpses of...someone else. A different universe altogether."

"Like the mirror universe?" PJ asked. She turned to look at her mother. "Where all the good people are evil and vice versa?"

"There's more than one, honey," Phoebe said soothingly. "This Chris is still good - we think. But he's from a much worse universe than ours - one where things still went wrong."

Wyatt was silent. Piper squeezed his shoulders, bracingly, but he didn't react.

"Chris isn't psychic though," PJ said quietly. She still looked miserable. "That's why we thought we could fix it with the spell - it was an unnatural connection."

"He's…" Piper trailed off helplessly, making eye contact with Phoebe again. If only the kids had said something. If only they'd explained everything to Chris, instead of trying to protect him by not saying anything. "No, he's not psychic. But." Wyatt twitched again, turning to look at Piper once more. The look on his face was accusatory, and Piper's heart skipped a beat. "But he has a...a power that's similar. It's sort of a power. It happened because of the other Chris - the one who traveled back in time when I was pregnant with him."

"Paradoxes," Wyatt said suddenly, his eyes bright, already making the connection.

Piper nodded. "That other Chris," she said, pausing to clear her throat, "he died at the same time that our Chris was born. So while they're different people, they - well, we don't know how souls work, exactly. But your father - he was with him when he died, and." Piper's voice failed again.

"The other Chris saved his life," Phoebe said gently. "Not only did he ensure that our Chris was born, he prevented Paige's death, and kept our world from descending into darkness. But because he stopped all that from happening, he essentially erased his own existence. The version of Chris that went back in time in the first place was never born - but without him being there, then this world would've never existed, and - bam! Paradox."

"So it gave our Chris these visions?" PJ asked, stricken. "What kind of stupid power is that?"

"We don't know yet, honey," Phoebe said. She pulled PJ back into the circle of her arms. "This is all just guessing. But the visions Chris described - we know they were from at least two different timelines. The details…" she looked over at Piper. "We think he was seeing lots of different versions of himself. And Uncle Leo is pretty sure it has to do with what happened to Future Chris."

"Same day," Piper said hoarsely. Wyatt reached up and squeezed her hands, and she smiled at him weakly. "Same hour. Same exact moment, we're pretty sure."

"Why didn't you tell him?" Wyatt asked. His voice was gentle, though. "You didn't want him to know?"

"He knew," Piper confessed. She shook her head, closing her eyes against the threatening tears. "He worked most of it out on his own. He was the one having them, after all. But he refused to talk about it much, and I just…" Piper shook her head. "I thought he would've talked to you, at least."

Wyatt shook his head, stricken. "He didn't talk about what the visions were about. Like, ever," he said. "But we knew they were getting worse, so we came up with the idea on his own...we convinced him to try it. He was indulging us, I'm pretty sure." His shoulders slumped. "I knew he didn't think it would work."

"This is all just speculation, remember," Phoebe said sternly. "Nothing like this has ever happened before - no other witch has successfully changed time on such a scale that we know of. We don't really know what these visions meant, and that's the truth."

"We made it worse," PJ said tearfully. "We sent him away. Now he's out there somewhere lost, because of us - "

"No," Piper said. Phoebe held PJ tightly, looking teary herself. They looked so similar, huddled together there on the couch. "No. The spell should've worked - all three of you, you're smart. You're good spellcrafters. And Chris was meticulous about this stuff - it should've worked. If there was something wrong in your spell, then it would've just...exploded or something, not opened a portal, for God's sake." Piper shook her head, firming her jaw. "Something else had to have interfered - some unknown quantity we didn't know about. Those are two completely different forms of magic, after all - it couldn't have been the spell's fault."

"I shouldn't have broken the circle," PJ said, anguished. "But I thought - maybe it would undo it."

Phoebe sighed, pulling PJ's head down to her shoulder. PJ went willingly, burying her face in the collar of her mother's sweater.

"We'll figure it out." Wyatt sounded eerily like Leo in that moment - assured, confident, yet still gentle, somehow - never domineering. "We'll get him back."

"Right," Piper said. There was no other option.

---

They didn't tell Paige, not yet. Henry was still in the hospital - shot in the line of duty a few weeks before, and he was still flat out refusing to be healed by Paige and Leo. What will everyone at work think? I know you guys throw around those memory spells like they're nothing, but we should at least try some good old fashioned secret keeping. Needless to say, Paige wasn't handling it well.

"She's gonna kill us," Phoebe muttered, climbing the stairs to the attic a few steps behind Piper, her feet heavy on the ancient wood. "Even if we manage to get him back before she finds out, she's still gonna kill us - "

"Tough cookies," Piper said, and elbowed the attic door open. Inside, the remains of the spellcrafting circle were still scattered across the floor - dried rosemary and willow branches from the yard, haphazardly kicked aside and scattered across the rug. The potion the kids had used had congealed in the scrying bowl. "Leo!"

"I'll try to find the entry in the Book they used," Phoebe said, stepping carefully over the debris from the circle. "I know they adapted it but maybe it'll help."

"Maybe," Piper said. She stomped her foot. "Leo!"

"He's still in Conference, sweetie, it might take a bit longer."

"I swear to God, I'm gonna blow up his stupid Conference - Leo!"

Finally, blue orbs rained down from the ceiling and her husband appeared. "What's wrong?" he demanded, before he was even fully formed. Piper stared at him for a second, struggling for words, and Leo frowned down at the remnants of the spell. He was still in his golden Elder robes, which always made him look ridiculous. "What happened?"

"Chris is missing," Phoebe said, without preamble. Leo's shoulders stiffened, and he yanked his head around to look at Piper, the look on his face almost accusatory. "The kids did a spell and accidentally opened a portal. It swapped him out with a version from another dimension."

"What the hell, I was only gone for like seven hours," Leo exclaimed.

"Not helpful," Phoebe chimed in from across the room, already flipping rapidly through the pages of the Book.

Leo took in the scene quickly: the remnants of the summoning circle, the general disarray of the attic from the winds of the portal, Piper's face, Phoebe's fixed smile. He steeled his shoulders. "Tell me."

Piper did. Leo's expression got darker and darker, and by the end Piper had to physically block the doorway to keep him from storming downstairs to yell at the kids. Fifteen years ago, if someone had told her that Leo would be the hard ass disciplinarian in their marriage, she would've laughed in their face.

"It wasn't their fault, they thought they were helping," Phoebe pleaded. "They feel bad enough already, Leo!"

"As bad as they felt when they accidentally turned Henry Jr. into a Valkryie?" Leo demanded. "Or what about the time they did an invisibility spell on the house and almost exposed magic again? Or the time they sneaked Aladdin's Lamp home from Magic School and summoned a genie who almost destroyed the timeline - "

"Fine, you have a point," Piper interrupted. "We'll yell at them later, okay? For now let's just focus on getting Chris back."

Leo breathed in and out, visibly trying to control his temper. "No, my point is that somewhere along the way, we stopped taking 'personal gain' seriously. This is just the latest example, Piper! I thought sending them to Magic School would fix the problem, but clearly it's just made it worse."

"Well, that is a much bigger discussion than we have time for right now," Phoebe said nervously. The air in the room was tense, and Piper found herself feeling somewhat removed from it - watching her husband's clear fury as if from very far away. "Shouldn't we be talking about - "

"How they swapped Chris out with a different version of himself?" Leo snapped. He crossed his arms. "Well, he's right. We're going to need a necromancer. Know any, Pheebs?"

Phoebe pressed her lips together, anger starting to brew on her own expression. Piper blinked away her fugue and quickly stepped between them before the conversation got any further away from them than it already was.

"He also said we needed someone who knew about physics," she said. "But I don't understand - we never needed any special help before, when we opened portals."

"We've never opened this kind of portal before!" Leo snapped. "Time travel is very different from dimension travel, Piper. When you go back and forth in time, you're not physically moving in space at all. But a different dimension altogether? The only experience we had with that was Gideon's mirror, and in that case he had a specific object which anchored his spell. He was also dealing with a mirror dimension - one that was tethered to ours. From what it sounds like, whatever the kids did was something entirely different."

"So we can reduplicate it," Phoebe said hopefully. "If we recreate the exact environment of their spell, wouldn't it - "

"Not necessarily," Leo said. He rubbed his forehead. "Listen. There are millions of universes - billions. An infinite number. Every decision we make creates another one - a dimension in which you had oatmeal for breakfast instead of cereal, or you took the bus to work instead of the train. Imagine that for a second - try to understand it. Every single choice, from every single being in our universe, creates another pocket reality. We couldn't even count them all. Not even if we could try."

Phoebe caught Piper's eye, her face grave and still a little angry. Piper frowned at her, and she averted her gaze quickly, her arms tightening where they were wrapped around her torso.

"What that means is that there's thousands of universes where the kids did this exact spell," Leo continues, "thousands upon thousands of Chrises that were just swapped out. For every single little variation - another Chris. Another version of him that's out of place." He took a deep breath. "We can narrow it down but it's still a matter of sifting through thousands of different choices, in order to find our Chris. And the longer we leave it, the more complex the action, the more choices there are, the more dimensions are created, the more versions of Chris there are to choose from. It's not just a needle in a haystack - it's trying to find a single atom in the whole of the universe. Most people wouldn't even try."

A heavy silence descended, and finally, Piper came back to herself a little. A spark of anger ignited in her chest. "We're not going to just give up on him."

"No, of course not. But it's going to take a lot more than just recreating this spell." Leo shot an angry glare down at the ruined spellcrafting circle. "This is what your Grams meant when she said we'd been too lenient with them. This is the worst case scenario, Piper."

Piper stiffened. "He's not dead," she bit out. "Just lost. We can get him back if he's just lost."

Leo just shook his head, his jaw angrily clenched.

"Okay," Phoebe interrupted, "we're upset, it's been a terrible day, but I don't think this is productive - "

"You agreed with me when I said she was being melodramatic," Piper said, somewhat numb outside of the anger. "Those were my exact words - 'melodramatic, critical.' You said yes, she was, you told me not to listen to her - "

"I was trying to make you feel better," Leo said. "I've told you a million times that we needed to be more strict with them about following the Wiccan Rede, and you were the one that would brush it off like it was nothing - "

"Guys," Phoebe said, more strenuously.

"It's kind of hard to enforce rules from both sides when you're hardly ever here," Piper snapped. "They act out more when you're gone, because they want their father's attention! It's easy for you to act all high and mighty when you're not the one dealing with it - "

"That's not fair. That's not fair," Leo said, "they follow your example, and that's the truth. They always have."

"You're part of the example!" Piper said, hearing herself yelling but not really registering it as a deliberate action. It was as if the words themselves took on a life of their own, crawling up out of her throat and into the chilly air between them. "You're part of it, Leo!"

"I'm not a witch, Piper," Leo replied bitterly. "I'm just their father."

"Alright," Phoebe said, physically moving between them, clapping her hands to break the tension. Piper took a surprised step back, and her back hit the attic door. "That's enough. You can fight about this later, but the kids are downstairs probably listening to every word we say right now."

"Because of course they're still using those eavesdropping spells," Leo said, still bitter. "Of course you didn't take their scrying stones away from them - "

"Enough," Phoebe said sternly, glaring. "That's my kid you're talking about too, Leo. Watch it."

Leo didn't back off, his face stubborn and dark. But he didn't say anything, either.

"We're not going to fix anything by throwing blame around," Phoebe said, ever the peacemaker, her voice calm and measured. "And maybe you're right, maybe we need to reevaluate some things, but now is not the time. You said it yourself, Leo, the longer we leave it, the harder it becomes."

"I need to go back up there," Leo said stiffly. "There are some other Elders that can possibly help. But I'll need to talk to them about it in person."

"Of course you do," Piper muttered, turning her face away. Tears stung her eyes, and she stubbornly ignored them.

"Go then," Phoebe said, her tone oddly gentle. "Piper and I will focus on the other Chris. He'll need - " she faltered for the first time, and Piper looked at her through watery eyes, her own heart pulsing with a halfhearted, strange sort of pain. "He'll need something. A place to stay...something. We can't just leave him on his own."

Leo still didn't say anything, and Piper didn't look at him. Instead, she wiped her eyes again, and straightened her shoulders. "I'll find him," she said. "I'll do it. You handle the kids, Phoebe. Keep them calm."

"What about Paige?" Leo asked for the first time. "Are we not telling her?"

"The baby," Phoebe said helplessly, "and Henry - we'll hold off for now, but - "

"No," Piper interrupted, meeting his gaze again with a deep breath. "We're not telling her yet."

Leo accepted this with a nod. For a moment, he looked regretful - his face softening just a bit, the smile wrinkles around his eyes appearing for the first time since he'd orbed in. But twenty years together had not yet taught Piper how to forgive easily - she doubted anything could. She'd given up long ago on her marriage ever being easy - at this point she figured they both had made their peace with not being at peace. There was something infinitely sad about that, but at the same time - she knew neither of them would prefer any other option.

There was something there about good things being worth fighting for, but Piper knew it was more complicated than that. Trying to make something fit that wasn't really made to be worn was more like it. But they were both much too stubborn to give up and put it back in the closet.

"I'll be back as soon as I can," Leo said, his expression growing distant once more. He hesitated, waiting for Piper to say something, but she didn't, and so he didn't. He orbed out without another word, the blue light illuminating the attic for a warm, brief second.

Phoebe blew out a careful, tense breath. "Wow."

"He's right," Piper said distantly. "I think he's right, Pheebs."

Phoebe moved, as if to hug her, but Piper turned her shoulder, shaking her head. "Piper, come on."

"I'm just saying." Piper wiped at her eyes again. "I'm gonna scry for Chris. I can use the 'call to powers' spell to get to him. Make sure they eat something. There's leftovers in the fridge from yesterday."

"Piper," Phoebe said again, her face slipping into a strange sort of despair. But Piper closed her eyes, unable to look.

She didn't want to be comforted. She didn't even want to be awake.

---

The last time Piper spoke to her youngest son was four days before. Chris had returned early from his college orientation - Amherst College, in Massachusetts. Third oldest university in the United States. A hundred miles away from Salem. The traditional, preferred school for about eight different well-established covens, light and dark, including a few Halliwells (well - they'd still been the Warrens, then), back before the family left the East Coast for sunnier shores. The other side of the country. It hadn't seemed so far away, until he actually went there for the first time. Piper realized, in the scant three days he was gone, that it was a different story altogether when she was the only one in her family who couldn't orb.

"I don't understand, I thought it was supposed to last a week?" Piper asked him. Chris had returned home at almost midnight, not even halfway through the orientation week. He'd orbed into his bedroom without a word, and Piper wouldn't have even noticed he was back if she hadn't been walking by his doorway at the exact right moment. "The weekend is the fun part, right? Where you go to all the mixers and bonfires, meet the people who will be living in your dorm, make ill-advised decisions, drink underage in parking lots, et cetera…"

"I told you, Mom, I don't drink," Chris said sourly, not seeming to catch onto the fact that she was joking. He'd been fairly stern, in the last few months. Not picking up on any jokes at all, no matter who it was telling it.

"I'm kidding. I know that," Piper said, sitting tentatively on the edge of his bed. "It's okay if you don't wanna talk about it, honey. But if it went badly, I'd like to know why."

"It didn't go badly," Chris said.

"Oh right, you just came home super early for no reason?"

Chris shrugged. What drove Piper crazy was that she knew extremely well how he could hide things from her. He was the only one in their family who had mastered self-healing - not even Leo could manage to do it as well, there'd always be a few stray bruises - little cuts that wouldn't close up all the way. But Chris could do it like he was born to it - casually, like it was nothing. Piper saw him cut himself once, while chopping a pineapple in the kitchen, and as he shook his injured hand out, shaking the juice and blood off his fingers, the wound disappeared with a little twirl of blue sparks. The blood disappeared too - and the knife and cutting board were cleansed of the spatter, as if it had never happened. The whole thing took a few seconds, tops - and while Piper wasn't sure how severe the cut had been in the first place, it was still a fairly impressive - and slightly disturbing - feat.

What was ironic was that Chris was also the worst at healing other people. It took him twice as long as three times the effort when it was someone else. Piper suspected it had to do with the fact that Leo had been an Elder when he was conceived - there was something much more self-preserving in Elder magic, much more so than the more gentle omniscience of Whitelighters. Wyatt was suited for that softer, selfless version of his father's legacy - whereas Chris was born with an Elder's strict, cool divinity.

Come to think of it, Leo himself was always just a little bit more easygoing, when he wasn't an Elder. He'd been on and off the last twenty years - only taking up a seat on the Council when he was needed. Piper could always tell the difference, the moment his magic changed. It was terrifying to think about - so she didn't, most of the time.

"Mom," Chris said, leaning against the wall in his bedroom and not doing much looking at her. As he'd gotten older Piper had struggled not to take offense at how withdrawn he became in her presence - the annoyance she could hear in his voice sometimes when she'd try to chat with him. Teenagers don't always stay friends with their moms, she'd tell herself. It's okay he wants some space. He has to have his own life. He'll always come back to you. He loves you, Piper, he loves you. "Do you think I'm making a mistake?"

"What, choosing a school so far away?" The question felt like a trap. "I think you had good reasons for picking Amherst. It's very different from California - I think it'll be good for you to live there for awhile. And it's not that far when you can orb, Chris."

"No, going to college at all," Chris said. "I could keep going to Magic School. They have apprenticeships, and general education classes. I could earn a Bachelor's by self-study and then study with one of the professors - Madame Dandurand told me I could study with her anytime I wanted. She thinks I could be a professor one day."

Piper resisted the instinctual urge to frown at the name; Madame Dandurand was one of Paige's formerly-evil 'projects,' a reformed demonic Seer who still gave Piper the creeps. But she'd been Chris's favorite teacher, and by all accounts, completely reformed. Other than her tendency to curse in front of the children, anyway. "Don't you think you'd be making an impulsive decision, if you did that now? You've always known about that option, honey. But you wanted to go to a real college, you wanted to make mortal friends. You've been planning this move for months." Piper waved her hands at his room, which had already begun making its way into boxes, in preparation for the move. "Come on. You had a bad week, and you're just gonna give up?"

"I didn't ask you to try and convince me of anything, I asked if you thought it was a mistake," Chris said with a scowl. "I know I'm being impulsive. I did have a bad week. No, I don't wanna talk about it - "

"Chris," Piper said with a frown.

"I don't wanna talk about it," Chris repeated firmly. "Just tell me what you really think. That's what would help. Your actual, unfiltered opinion. I think I'm old enough."

Piper reached out and grasped his hand. Chris allowed it for a moment, smiling faintly, squeezing her fingers gently. His hand was already bigger than hers - a man's hand. There was some hair on his knuckles; calluses that were already forming on his palms from his summer job with a construction outfit. Honest work, he'd wanted. Real work, he'd said. "Chris, I love you so much it hurts sometimes. I'm a mother, and I'm an anxious person. So of course if you ask me what I want, then I want you to stay here. It makes me feel calmer having you in the house - not just because I can keep an eye on you, but because you can keep an eye on us." She raised an eyebrow. "Wyatt and PJ look up to you, and so will Henry Jr and Peyton, when they're old enough. And don't think you don't keep your aunts in line, as well."

Chris grinned, a fleeting flash of teeth.

"But I know we rely on you too much. I rely on you too much," Piper admitted. "It was a lot of pressure, I know that. That's on us."

"I didn't mind," Chris said.

"We still shouldn't have done it," Piper insisted. "Your brother has always been reckless, and we didn't always know how to temper that, so we let you do it for us. That wasn't right." She reached out and squeezed his hand again, unable to help herself. "You just naturally took to it - even when you were young. You were the big brother, even though you weren't. It was just your personality." A little wiggle of unease, at that thought - the same one for the past nineteen years. The unasked question, in the back of her mind, of how much that other version of her son actually changed, with his final act of sacrifice. "I think...honestly, and I'm not just saying this...I think that it'll be good for you to be away from us for awhile. I think we stress you out a little too much, and even though you don't admit it, you want to be on your own for a bit. It'll be good for you to get away from all this...history." Piper threw a wry look above their heads, at the attic which sits above them at all times, its silent, drawing presence a constant question in the air of their home. "Magic School would do that for you, too. But I think we both know that there's not much more you can learn there."

Chris looked thoughtful, rubbing one palm against his knee. He looked like Leo when he did that.

"If you want to have a life outside of us," Piper said, with a deep, fortifying breath, "then you need to go out and find one, Chris. It's not going to just fall in your lap."

"Yeah," Chris said. "If I want that."

"Well, I can't answer that question for you. But I don't think you'd be this torn up about it if you didn't," Piper said.

"I do," Chris said, looking like it cost him a lot to admit it. "But I just…"

Piper kept her mouth shut and waited. Patience was the best way through with Chris.

"I just realized for the first time how hard it's going to be," he finally admitted. "Most of those kids are never going to understand. They've lived these really safe, boring lives, and it was hard for me to…"

Care? Piper finished his sentence in her own head. "There are witches and demons in Massachusetts too, Chris."

"I know that," Chris said.

"So go find them! You were at the weirdest, most awkward week of college at a mortal school - I'm almost positive that you weren't going to meet any actual friends yet. Everyone's trying too hard, anxious, worried about how they're coming off to everyone else…" Piper hadn't gone to a traditional college, but the culinary institute had had a similar social type of event, the weekend before classes started. A meek, self-conscious nineteen year old, Piper had stayed just long enough to be able to tell Grams she'd given it a real try, and then fled for the safety of her bedroom. She'd stayed up all night reading Mists of Avalon and eating barbecue Pringles chips.

Piper cannot imagine Chris, in any universe, eating Pringles chips. He came out of the womb with much better taste - he'd probably disown her if she ever tried to get him to try them.

"But it's the experience that matters, right?" Chris asked wryly.

"Something like that." Piper smiled at him. "Would you like to hear another one of my embarrassing stories?"

"Mom, I live for your embarrassing stories," Chris said with a grin, and so Piper told him about the barbecue chips. He laughed in all the right places, and even managed to make her feel a little better about the memory, somehow. He was always so empathetic like that - sensing when someone needed to be reassured, and pulling it off without embarrassing them. Piper liked to think he got that from her, but in all reality it was probably Phoebe or Leo.

The memory burns a little; she'd meant to take him out for breakfast, to try and cheer him up, but there'd been a minor disaster at the club and Piper was stuck at work until well into the early hours of the morning, the next day. Then Chris left to go see some friends - he was frustratingly vague about who - and didn't return until the following day. And then the next time Piper saw him was in passing - as he grabbed a bottle of water from the kitchen, on his way to the attic, where PJ and Wyatt were waiting for him.

"Some kind of vision quest thing," he'd told her, with a dismissive shrug. "It'll be quick. Probably a dud, anyway, since PJ wrote the spell. You know how she is."

"She tries," Piper said, swatting his arm. She'd been distracted by her cooking; she hadn't thought to say anything. She hadn't thought anything of it at all - the kids were always doing spells up in the attic. They'd long since stopped monitoring what they were doing - they trusted them to be responsible.

They trusted their children. That's what Leo had ignored, in his accusations. Maybe not Wyatt and PJ, but...they trusted Chris. He was the one who always kept them in line, just like she'd said. All those mistakes and near disasters he mentioned - they happened when Chris wasn't around. Just his mere presence tended to have a calming effect on everyone - his stern, no-nonsense approach to magic was a good influence on his brother and his cousin.

The exact thing that Piper had just admitted was a bad habit. And the one time it didn't work. If the universe was stupid enough to try and tell her something by putting her kid in danger - well, it had another thing coming, that's for sure.

---

Piper found him at a bar in the Castro, still wearing the same worn down, apocalyptic outfit - though it looked like he'd down some sort of cleaning spell, enough to allow him to escape scrutiny in public. He was at the bar, arguing with someone in Spanish, and he didn't look up when Piper approached.

"Chris," she said.

"Estás diciendo que no sabes," Chris said. The man he was arguing with - older, grey at his temples, very obviously a warlock of some kind, judging by the ring of black smoke hovering at his wrists - shrugged. "Eres estúpido o simplemente ciego?"

"Maybe both," the warlock answered, in a perfectly normal American accent. Piper blinked, wondering why Chris was even bothering with Spanish, before she remembered the translation spell she'd cast on herself years ago, so she could understand the Latin chants at the Magic School graduation ceremonies. It was a lifetime spell, unless it was broken - she'd forgotten all about it. Chris was probably immune, being a good witch. "Perhaps you should stick around to find out. Call me some more names, see where it takes you."

"Quieres una cita, cariño?" Chris asked, clearly a taunt by his voice. "Todo lo que tiene que hacer es preguntar."

"Listen, you son of a bitch," the warlock said, and Piper didn't wait any longer, reaching out with her hands to freeze the entire bar. The warlock froze, arm halfway extended, sparkling energy of a half-formed spell hovering in the palm of his open hand. Chris turned with sharp irritation, and glared at her.

"Seriously?" he asked.

"It's rude to throw a party and not invite your mother," Piper said, and gestured with her hands again. The warlock's glass of liquor exploded and then froze, a few seconds into a deadly spray of glass into the older man's face, providing a helpful distraction once time resumed.

"You're not my mother," Chris said pointedly, and moved out of the blast zone of the exploding glass.

Piper breathed through the sting of hearing that in such a familiar voice. "Making friends?"

He rolled his eyes. Piper was struck again by how different he was from her Chris - the way he held himself was stiffer, his stance defensive, his muscles much more defined than she'd thought before, now that she saw them up close. His beard changed the whole shape of his face and made it hard to gauge his age, though Piper was sure that he was at least over thirty. The faint wrinkles around his eyes gave him away. "What do you want?"

"What do you think I want?" Piper eyed the frozen warlock over his shoulder, uneasy by his presence. Her powers were stronger than they'd ever been - she could keep the whole block frozen forever if she wanted - but she'd met too many powerful black magic users who could fight through it not to worry. "What were you asking him about?"

"I was trying to find something that might help me get home," Chris said shortly. He glanced derisively at the warlock. "I didn't need your help."

"I know that. But you got it anyway," Piper said. "Let's get out of here before he unfreezes. I don't like the look of that bartender."

"Thanks, but no thanks," Chris said, already moving away. "I've got to get going. There are other leads."

"Chris," Piper said, following him out into the floor of the small bar. This seemed to be one of those in-the-know places, frequented by magicals and mortals who knew more than most. There were two women frozen by the pool table, and one of them had a demonic rune tattooed on the back of her hand. The bouncer had a sage smudging stick on his little table, right next to his UV light and stamp pad. "Don't be stupid. You know we have to work together if we're going to make any headway on this - "

"It's only been like, a fucking hour. Stop following me!" Chris turned on one heel, near the doorway, and pinned her with a furious glare. "I just needed a break; I wasn't planning on running away to Mars or anything."

"You have a Mars in your universe?" Piper weakly joked. "Well - we might not be as far apart as we thought then."

Chris rubbed one of his temples, grimacing deeply. Yeah, she didn't think it was that funny, either.

"We don't have to go back to the Manor," Piper said, phrasing it like a compromise, although she hadn't been planning on taking him back there in the first place. "We can go to my club - P3? Does that exist in your - in your world?" Chris's face was unreadable. "Well - anyway, I own a nightclub. Nobody will be there. We're closed on Mondays. It's sort of a tradition here, for bars - nobody's open on Mondays." She was aware, dimly, that she was babbling a little, but she couldn't help herself. "I just - there's a room? An office, but you could...use it, if you wanted. I have clothes too, and food - you could have some privacy, wash up a little, whatever you want - I understand why you'd be uncomfortable at the house, but I figured maybe - "

"Fine. Jesus. Stop talking." Chris winced again, like she was giving him a headache just with her presence. "Thank you for the offer, but I can find my own accommodation. I'll come see your little club if you want me to, though." He grimaced again. "Just to talk."

"But you don't even have any money," Piper blurted, then felt like kicking herself. "No offense."

"I'm a fucking witch," Chris said, like she was being particularly stupid. Though Piper was starting to think that this Chris sort of thought everyonewas a little stupid. "Why in the hell would I need money?"

Piper struggled for words for a second. "Is personal gain not a thing where you come from?"

"It's not personal gain if you're using magic to survive, first of all, and second of all you really don't wanna go down that road with me right now," Chris snapped. "The only reason I'm standing here at all is because your children just took a shit all over the Wiccan Rede."

Piper winced at the vulgarity. "Hey now - "

"Heads up," Chris interrupted, and the room unfroze. Piper whirled around in surprise - she hadn't meant to unfreeze it, had something happened? - and the warlock by the bar screamed in pain as the glass exploded in his face. The women by the pool table straightened up in alarm, and the bouncer rose quickly to his feet, narrowing his eyes at Chris and Piper. "We better get out of here," Chris said, moving forward to grip her elbow. "Have you figured out how to teleport yet?"

"Yet?!" Piper asked incredulously, snapping her head around to glare at him. "You did that, didn't you? You unfroze the room - "

"I don't know what you're talking about," Chris said, and orbed them out before she could muster a reply. The last thing she saw before the bar dissolved into blue light was the warlock storming towards them in rage, his hands outstretched threateningly. Blood was streaming down his face, making him look rather terrifying.

(Then again, Piper had seen much worse.)

They reappeared inside of P3, smack dab in the middle of the empty dance floor. Piper staggered back a few steps, lightheaded, and Chris reached out to steady her with one hand. He smelled like sage and rye whiskey.

"What," she sputtered. That didn't feel like regular orbing. Her head was spinning. "How did you know where - "

"P3 existed in my world," Chris said, keeping his hand against her shoulder as she grasped for her bearings. "I never said it didn't."

"Smug ass," she muttered, shaking his hand off. She blinked up at him, seeing his smirk, and was reminded of the first Chris she ever met - the one she'd gotten to know as a person first, before she knew he was her son. "Why did you unfreeze the room?"

"The outdoor bouncer is a good witch," Chris said. He pulled back his hand and surveyed the room, one eyebrow angled. "She comes in every ten, fifteen minutes to check on things." He smirked again. "Probably to catch people just like you, barging in and causing trouble."

"Or you?" Piper countered. She moved over to one of the barstools, trying not to make it too obvious that her stomach was still a bit queasy. "You were the one that started that fight."

"He would've thrown a punch at me or something," Chris said with a shrug. "You escalated it by using magic."

"You don't know any of this," Piper accused. "You're not from this universe. Things could be different - you're just guessing."

"An educated guess about the punch maybe, but I'm right about the bouncer. I do my homework," Chris said. He meandered over to the bar, laying his palms out flat on the wooden railing. In the afternoon sun streaming through the window, he looked remarkably like Piper's dad - especially with the beard. "So. I'm here."

"Yes." Now that she's got him, Piper doesn't know what to do with him. "Leo's working on finding some help. He knows some Elders who might be able to do something."

Chris didn't react. Piper had been hoping for something - even a little twitch - but there was nothing. "This place looks nice," he said instead, still looking around with an alert gaze. "You have live music here?"

Piper looks over at the stage, which still has some sound equipment set up from last night's show. They'd left most of it the way it was, since the band had another show tomorrow night. "Yeah." Curiosity made her itchy. "Did it...not? In your world?"

A faint, bitter smirk spread across his face. "P3 went out of business years ago," he said. "I was too young to have ever been there. So I honestly have no idea what it was like."

"But you knew where it was," Piper said. She narrowed her eyes. "That could've changed, between our two universes. We could've ended up in the middle of an interstate or something."

Chris looked faintly amused. "Do you use GPS coordinates to orb, in this universe?" he asked. "I orbed to a place, not an address."

Piper honestly had no idea how orbing worked, being one of the few people in her family who couldn't do it. Even Phoebe had learned how to astral project, a few years back. "What did you mean 'do I know how to teleport yet?'"

"My mother could do it. It's a side benefit of your molecular destabilization power," Chris said. He tilted his head. "You can speed things up to make them explode, slow them down until they freeze. You can move them, too. If you want."

Piper didn't know what to say. The possibility had honestly never occurred to her.

"It is much harder, don't get me wrong. My mom still has trouble with it sometimes," Chris said.

Piper felt her mind crash up against an unexpected brick wall. "Wait - your mother is still alive?"

Chris looked surprised by her surprise. "...yes?" he said. He frowned. "Why the hell would you think she wasn't?"

Because I'm always dead, Piper thought. That's the one thing that's always true, in all those universes: the Mom always dies. "I - I just assumed," she stammered, "you obviously come from a...rough place, and - and the visions my Chris was having, I wasn't in them."

"He wasn't having visions of me," Chris said, with a dismissive shake of his head. He slid onto one of the barstools. "Is that what you wanted to talk to me about? The differences between our two worlds?"

"Would it help?" Piper asked. She desperately wanted to know, of course. She always desperately wanted to know what it was that her Chris was seeing too, late at night when he was asleep, his mind drifting about in a place she couldn't reach. But if he was close-lipped with Wyatt, he was practically made of stone, whenever she dared to ask. "Mostly I wanted to keep an eye on you, I'll admit. Until we hear back from Leo we can't do anything, and I have no idea who you even are. What your motivations might be, what kind of havoc you might be out there reaping…you are a Halliwell, after all. Havoc is practically in your DNA."

"Well that's honest," Chris praised, laughing a little, to her surprise. She hadn't expected him to laugh at one of her jokes - her own Chris never did, though he did indulge her with a grin or a smirk from time to time. "This is a bar. Do I have to pay for drinks, or is that a Halliwell privilege too?"

Piper considered. Of course she made her family pay, and even though Wyatt was of age by then, he never would've dared step foot in his mother's bar. But this was, of course, a very strange day. An exception if there ever was one. "What do you like?"

"Anything but beer."

"Good taste," Piper said, and ducked around behind the bar. She could be a hundred years old, and she'd still be able to mix a killer cocktail with her eyes closed. It was the talent she knew would never go away. "I'll make you something good."

---

He seemed more relaxed, here in this environment, a drink in his hand and a smile on his face. Piper didn't drink much herself, but she made herself the same cocktail out of solidarity: a Blackberry Smash, spruced up with some rosemary. It was P3's signature drink - she'd invented it herself, about eight years ago. The twist that made it unique was that she used mango instead of plum.

"This is really fucking good," Chris said, taking a healthy gulp. "Thank you. I needed this."

"You always curse this much, or is just the stress?" Piper asked, sipping her own glass a bit slower.

"You don't like it? My mother curses a lot." Chris shakes his head, shaking the glass to mix up the ice with the fruity pulp, down at the bottom. "Like, a lot."

"My grandmother used to make us wash our mouths out with soap if she caught us using foul language," Piper said. She winced at herself - foul language, what year was it? "Literal soap. Once is all you need to break that habit."

Chris's expression had sharpened. "Your grandmother?" he asked. "Penelope Halliwell?"

"Let me guess - she's the dead one."

He angled his glass at her as a 'yes.' "Before my mom was even born. What happened to Grandma here? Patty, I mean."

"Well. She died." Even after all those years, it was still hard to say it. "When I was five. She was drowned by a water demon."

Chris blew out a sad breath through his teeth. "I think she told me about a water demon once. At a summer camp?"

Piper nodded, unable to speak.

"She's alive, too." Chris's face was sympathetic, if not a little distantly so. "I just saw her a few weeks ago."

Piper's breath felt frozen. "That's - amazing," she managed. "I mean that. I really do."

Chris gave a half-smile, setting his glass down with a quiet 'clink.' He still looked torn between sympathy and a pained grimace.

She decided to rescue him. "That must be one of the major points of diversion," she said. "My mother's death. Or my grandmother's - how did she pass away in your world?"

"I think it was a heart attack? I don't remember exactly," he said. "They didn't talk about her much."

"It was the same here," Piper explained, "only much later. I was twenty-five."

Chris nodded in silence, taking another drink. His leg was jittering beneath the bar - she could see the way his jacket moved, twitched back and forth with the movement.

Piper didn't know how to say it gently, so she didn't bother to try. "And your brother? Wyatt?"

Chris set his glass down again, harder than before. "Dead."

"Was he - "

"Yes."

Piper took a deep, shaky breath. Chris's face was closed off again, shut down as it was when he first appeared. "My Wyatt doesn't know," she blurted. "About - about that. Leo and I never told him."

Chris appeared to be struggling for words, one hand clenched into a fist on the surface of the wooden bar. "That seems...ill-advised."

"We never knew how to tell him," Piper confessed. The words came rushing out, then, much more easily than they should have, with this alternate version of her son: but then again, Piper always did talk to Chris a little too freely. It was so easy to forget he was a kid - he had such a way about him, such a firm, empathetic demeanor that it was difficult not to confide in him. Maybe it was partly her fault - Chris's struggle with leaving San Francisco. Maybe she should've treated him more like her son than like her friend. "He knows about the time travel, of course, but when he was little we just used to say it was a 'disaster,' because of course we couldn't explain the whole thing to a seven-year-old, right?" Piper shook her head. "I'm not trying to justify it or anything, but we just kept putting it off, until it got to the point that we didn't know how to explain it without causing this big…thing, and then we figured...why did we have to? We'd changed it, prevented it - so did it even matter?" Piper took another drink. "Stupid. You don't have to tell me."

"Time travel?" Chris repeated, looking lost. "What are you talking about?"

"The - " Piper broke off. "That never happened in your world."

"Obviously not."

She took a deep breath. "Wyatt isn't evil here because Chris - another version of Chris - traveled back in time and changed the future," she said. "That's why my Chris has those visions. His older, future self died in the past, at the same moment that I was giving birth to him in the present. It caused a paradox."

Chris looked faintly perplexed, staring down into his now-empty glass. "So many Chrises," he murmured. "I never did that."

"Clearly - "

"Nobody did that," Chris continued, as if she hadn't tried to interrupt. "We killed him. That's how we stopped him. We had to kill him."

Piper felt faintly ill, looking at the expression on his face. She'd only ever seen that expression on one other person before, and it took her an absurdly long time to recognize it for what it was. "I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry, Chris."

"Yeah, well." He tipped the glass back, sliding one of the ice cubes into his mouth. Not meeting her eyes, he chewed for a long moment before he said anything else. "If the future version died while trying to save his brother, then it was an act of self-sacrifice. His soul would've been sent to the Whitelighters by default."

"It wasn't," Piper said. She bit her lip. "Leo thinks it's because he was out of his own time. For years we thought maybe his original timeline was preserved - that we created a new branch, instead of truly destroying the original one - and that future version of Chris became a Whitelighter there. But now…"

"You think he's still trapped," Chris concludes, as sharp as her own Chris, but twice as blunt. "You think that's what these visions are. He's got the other Chris's soul inside of him."

"If - if he was," Piper stammered, "then at least he's not...somewhere worse. At least he's still…" loved, she couldn't bear to say.

This Chris didn't say anything. The silence was a heavy weight between them; the only sound in the room was the gentle clinking of the ice as he tilted his glass, the crunch of his teeth as he bit down on another cube.

"I'm not sure if that helps our current situation," he finally said. "Did you look at the spell they used? Were they trying to summon me specifically, or was it something else entirely?"

"It was supposed to be a vision quest," Piper said firmly, shaking her head. "That's why Chris was in the summoning circle. PJ wrote her own incantation, and they used the potion and herbs for a traditional meditative vision spell. We still don't know how a portal even opened - nobody here did it on purpose. They were as surprised as you were."

Chris was frowning down at the bartop. "And you believe them?"

"Of course."

He scoffed. "I had to ask," he said. His eyes were shadowed. "If my son pulled something like this, my first thought would be that he was trying to pull one over on me."

"You - you have a - " Piper felt herself hit that invisible brick wall again. "A son?"

His face somehow went soft and angry at the same time. "I have two children. A girl and a boy."

Piper felt her breath leave her body in one swift whoosh, leaving nothing but empty, aching space behind.

"My wife and I live in Mérida," he continued. "...that's in Mexico."

"I know where it is," she snapped, grabbing her drink and downing the rest in one long gulp.

He was eyeing her warily, when she lowered the highball. "I'm just saying," he said, "that's why I speak Spanish. Are you okay?"

"Is it Bianca?" she blurted. "Your wife."

His face did something strange. "How do you…"

"Some things are universal, I guess," she said, and shook her head. "The future Chris I knew...but it's not important. Please don't tell me anymore." She felt her voice go reedy and thin, as if she were pleading. "It's not that I don't want to know, do you understand? I want to know so bad, but I can't…"

He held up a hand. "Fine." Pushing his glass towards her, he raised an eyebrow. "You got more of that in that shaker?"

Piper refilled both their glasses without another word. Her hand shook, making the metal of the shaker rattle against the lip of the glasses.

With the same empathy that made her own Chris easy to talk to, this one didn't mention it. He simply drank with her in silence, looking around the interior of her club with vague interest.

Piper became slowly more and more aware of the physical reality of his presence there: the rustle of his clothes, and the nervous, constant movement of his jittering knee beneath the bar. There was a scar on his cheek, she noticed. His hair seemed thicker. His beard really did suit him - would her own Chris grow a beard, one day? She tried to picture it, but she couldn't. This man seemed like a completely different person. Different even from Future Chris, who she'd loved and grieved for, for almost twenty years now.

"It is really nice," he said finally. "You make good money?"

"Good enough," Piper said, her voice hoarse.

"I'd imagine so. With live music, it'd be easy."

"Why'd your P3 go out of business?" Piper can't help but ask. "I thought about selling a few times. When the kids were young, it got really difficult. But…" My last link to Prue, was the truth. The last holdover from the person she was before her sister died.

Chris just shrugged. "I never asked," he said. He was wearing a wedding ring, she noticed for the first time. It was made of some sort of stone - black, glinting in the fading sunlight from the skylights. "I should have asked her more questions, probably. But I was too interested in my own life - like most teenagers."

"Ask her when you get back," Piper suggested.

Chris huffed, his face turning bitter again, and Piper's stomach soured. "Sure," he said.

---

Piper didn't make it home that night. She slept at the club, in the same little room Future Chris once slept in - although the cot has gone through some improvements, in the years since. Leo slept in this room sometimes, during some of their rough patches. He didn't technically need to sleep, being technically not human, but he liked to do it anyway. Piper always suspected it was to make her feel better, more than anything else.

("Tell me, does it bother you that your husband's body is a facsimile, and his true nature is of a soul tethered to this dimension by a heavenly council of angelic beings made of divine intent?" That was Paige. Right after she'd finally gotten around to researching the true nature of Whitelighters, and promptly had a month-long existential crisis that nearly ruined her marriage, among other things.

"No," Piper had said.)

Leo told her once, what the Elders really looked like. Anyone can become one, he said, but once you do you can never really go back. You can give up the responsibility, but your magic doesn't ever change back to what it once was. Angels - real angels, like the Elders were - were inhuman in a way that the mortal brain honestly can't comprehend it - that's why they always looked strange to her, when she saw them in person. When they were looked upon by other beings, they were seen as forms similar to what the observer expected - an old man in weird-looking robes, human-looking, regular eyes and hair and voices. But in reality, that's not what they were at all.

"When I took you up there - you don't remember," Leo said. "The first time. All those years ago. After you left Dan for me."

"Oh my God, we were so young," Piper murmured.

"That was the only time they gave you the Sight," Leo continued. "The ability to perceive them on their level - at least to a certain extent."

"Is that why I didn't remember?" Leo nodded. "But you remembered."

"I did," Leo said. "Would you like to know how you reacted?"

"Was it graceful and classy and not embarrassing?" Piper joked. "Because if not, then my answer is no."

"You cried," Leo said gravely, squeezing her hands. "You cried and you turned to me and said that they were the most beautiful things you'd ever seen. And then you fell to your knees and closed your eyes and prayed. I'd never seen you pray before." Leo paused. "Or since."

Piper didn't even know what to say to that. "That doesn't sound very much like me."

"Exactly," Leo replied. "That's the danger of Seeing them - they make you...not yourself. They're not magic, exactly - they're much more. Fallible still, of course, but...divine, even so." He pursed his lips. "Divinity isn't perfect, I think I've learned that by now. It's just a different form of power. But it still...overwhelms you. Makes you do strange things, when you're truly in their presence."

Piper thought of the day the majority of them were slaughtered by the Titans - the morning Leo had orbed down into her arms, covered in blood which she didn't understand at the time was his own. I'm the only one, he'd said, not making any sense at all. I'm the only one left, it's just me, I'm alone. I'm alone.

"Good thing they're on our side," Piper had said, chilled. "Most of the time."

"Most of the time," Leo agreed.

Piper never considered herself religious at all, even though she did have...a certain sort of guilt, from a childhood in the company of the Trudeaus. Andy and his parents were Catholic, and traditionally so, and many, many Sunday mornings were spent with them at church - Pheebs had been too young, of course, but Piper and Prue weren't, and Grams would dress them up in their finest dresses and send them off to the neighbor's house to be packed up in the car along with Andy and his brothers, off for a long morning at Mission Dolores. As disdainful as Grams could be about Christainity, she still had no qualms about unloading her grandkids for an entire day every week. Pheebs always went to the other neighbor's - a young college student who babysat for cash - and Grams would spend most of her day "playing cards." (As an adult, Piper suspected that was probably a euphemism for a lot of different things.)

"It's all tripe," Grams would say, but every Sunday Piper found herself back at church, holding hands with Prue in the back pew, muffling their giggles at the boys' antics. Andy was the only serious one of the bunch - solemn even as a little boy, he'd sit next to them and faithfully listen to the sermon, saying the prayers loud enough that they both could hear and follow along with some accuracy.

His family buried him at a church, when he died. Not Mission Dolores - that graveyard was extremely haunted, the sisters learned, during an unfortunate Samhain outing about twelve years ago - but a nice, traditional Catholic cemetery in Fremont. The Halliwell mausoleum would never have been allowed on holy ground, but a part of Piper wished they could've put Prue closer to him, somehow. They deserved that much of an ending, at least.

Phoebe kept calling her with increasing frequency until Piper finally turned off her phone, around midnight. Exhausted from the day, still angry deep down in her heart - though at who exactly, she wasn't sure - Piper decided she deserved to say "fuck it."

"Wyatt's worried," was the first thing Leo said, bright and early the next morning. He'd orbed in at dawn and joined her on the tiny cot, wrapping his arms around her, squeezing an apology into her torso. Piper hadn't said a word, and laid there for a dreamy two hours until she started to hear the traffic pick up outside. Then she got up and brewed coffee, waiting for Leo to follow. Which he did, of course.

"I'm worried," Piper said. "About our other son, who is lost in the freaking multiverse, right now."

"Are you afraid you'll yell at them? Blame them?" Leo asked, and didn't wait for an answer. "Pheebs is with them. And I have some news."

"Let's hear it," Piper said, picking up the small French press and moving over to one of the lounge couches. The one they always used to sit at, when they were young - her and Pheebs and Prue and then Paige, young and dressed up, their hair done as nicely as they knew how. It was the same couch and everything - Piper never threw anything away.

The Elder Leo knew was called Oriphel, although they usually went by 'Ori.' They'd never been human - they were one of the Ancient Ones, an Elder who had escaped the Titans' slaughter, and many other disasters and threats, before and since. They were also one of the Elders who had argued in favor of Piper and Leo's marriage, all those years ago.

"Where did they come from, if they were never a human?" Piper asked.

"I don't know," Leo said. "They're old. Very, very old. Maybe they don't even remember." That was sobering enough to stifle any more questions.

Ori was a kind being, without gender or much of a physical form, which is how they'd escaped the Titans. Leo said they had advice on the situation, although he had to be in Piper's presence when he remembered it.

"...remember it?"

"It's...a thing," Leo said uncomfortably. "They can give you a memory and then lock it up so you can only remember it again with a certain trigger...anyway - "

"Did they do this to us?" Piper demanded. "Oh my God, can you do that, when you have your Elder powers? I swear to God Leo if you messed with my head at any point I'm gonna - "

"Would you calm down? Drink your coffee," Leo said. "I'm like, an Elder but I'm not an Elder like Ori's an Elder. They're like...an Elder." He shifted again, still visibly uncomfortable. "There's a hierarchy."

"How is it that we've been married for two decades and you're still explaining things to me," Piper grumbled. "Okay, what's the trigger?"

"This." Leo held out a white candle. "You just light it."

"Okay." Piper took it from him and placed it carefully on the low table, next to her French press. "Should we...call for backup, lay down a tarp, what?"

Leo snorted. "I'll probably just go into a trance and say some weird stuff."

"Well. That's easily manageable." Piper went over to the bar to dig out one of the lighters from the lost and found - they were always finding them scattered around the club, falling from patrons' pockets. "You sure you don't want to...get ready somehow? Lay down, eat some protein?"

"Would you just do it?" Leo asked, rolling his eyes. But he was smiling, a little. Their fight the day before seemed far, far away.

Piper took a fortifying sip of coffee, and lit the candle. The change was almost instantaneous - Leo's body language changed, his eyes went startlingly blank. A soft, hazy light descended upon the room, and Piper's own eyelids drooped - as if she were suddenly very tired, or very high, or both.

PIPER AND LEO HALLIWELL, Leo said. His voice seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once, and Piper dimly noticed that his lips weren't even moving. I OFFER YOU CONDOLENCES ON THE RECENT LOSS OF YOUR SON. HE WAS A POWERFUL BEING OF GOOD IN YOUR WORLD.

He's not gone, Piper said. Or wanted to say. Somehow.

NOT COMPLETELY. BUT HE IS FAR FROM OUR CURRENT REACH, Leo said. This seemed more like a conversation, Piper realized suddenly, then a recorded memory of some kind. Was Ori there? Or did it even matter? IT MAY BE POSSIBLE TO RETRIEVE HIM, BUT THE TASK IS DIFFICULT. TEMPER YOUR EXPECTATIONS, DAUGHTER. PREPARE YOURSELF FOR YOUR GRIEF SO THAT IT DOES NOT OVERWHELM YOU.

Fuck you, Piper said.

NO THANK YOU, Leo replied. Not Leo. Oriphel. Piper felt frozen in her seat. She wanted to laugh but she felt like she'd been turned to stone - was this what it felt like for people when she froze time? God, she couldn't even imagine. LEO HAS ASKED ME FOR ADVICE, AND I HAVE SOME TO OFFER. TO FIND YOUR SON, YOU MUST USE THE ONE THAT HAS BEEN BROUGHT HERE. THERE IS A CONNECTION BETWEEN THEM - IT IS THE REASON THE PORTAL CHOSE HIM. IF YOUR CHRIS STILL LIVES, THEN YOU CAN USE THAT CONNECTION TO TRACE HIS JOURNEY. THAT IS, IF THE OTHER ONE IS WILLING.

What does that mean, Piper said.

IT IS AN ARDUOUS THING TO ASK OF HIM. IT WILL BE PAINFUL. HE WILL HAVE TO SACRIFICE A PIECE OF HIMSELF IN ORDER TO MAKE THE CONNECTION STRONG ENOUGH TO FOLLOW. IT WILL NOT BE EASY.

You're talking about his soul. You're talking about what happened with my Chris and his future self.

YES, Ori said. YOU ALREADY KNOW IN YOUR HEART WHAT HAPPENED TO YOUR SON THE DAY HE WAS BORN. YOU ALREADY KNOW HOW IT OPENED HIM TO THE UNIVERSE.

Piper thought about the other Chris. An older, weary Chris, who had a wife and children, who spoke Spanish and smiled at her bitterly, like he couldn't even bear to look at her. His mother was alive, but he still talked about her in the past tense. The way he said "my son" made Piper feel like she wanted to die, there was so much protective, desperate fierceness in it.

HE MAY BE WILLING. BUT IT WILL TAKE MUCH OF HIS STRENGTH. AND YOUR SON HAS TO BE WILLING TOO.

Piper wanted to die right then and there, actually. She wanted to just die, instead of listening to this. This undeniable voice.

I WISH I HAD BETTER NEWS FOR YOU. BUT A PORTAL WAS OPENED, AND THERE IS ONLY ONE WAY FOR THAT TO HAVE HAPPENED, Ori continued. She could still see Leo, but his face seemed warped - distorted through a mirror. HE IS A STRONG YOUNG MAN, BUT HE HAS LIED TO YOU HIS ENTIRE LIFE. YOU KNOW THIS TO BE TRUE. YOU DID NOT WANT TO LOOK, BUT YOUR EYES CAN REMAIN CLOSED NO LONGER.

No, Piper said. No.

TO FIND YOUR SON AGAIN, YOU MUST KNOW HIM, Ori said. FOLLOW THE PATH HE TOOK, AND THERE YOU WILL FIND HIS TRUTH. UNTIL YOU DO THIS, THERE IS NO HOPE.

I know my son. I know my son.

YOU DO NOT, and somehow the voice felt gentle. Like a warm hand against Piper's back. YOU DID NOT SEE HIS PAIN. YOU DID NOT SEE BECAUSE YOU WISHED FOR IT NOT TO EXIST. WE CAN MAKE OURSELVES BELIEVE ANYTHING, IF WE LOVE STRONGLY ENOUGH. THIS IS THE WEAKNESS OF A HUMAN HEART.

Piper could feel the presence retreating, the haze lifting slightly as Ori left - faded away, back into the candle, or whatever the fuck it was they lived. Her breath was coming in short, huffing breaths, and she realized with a dim clarity that she was also crying.

GOOD LUCK, DAUGHTER. CALL UPON ME AGAIN IF YOU WISH. Leo's body shivered violently - Piper could feel his knees shaking, pressed against her own on the couch - and the haze lifted then completely. The candle snuffed itself out, leaving them in semi-darkness, a thin trail of smoke winding its way up from the wick.

Leo blinked, and then his face crumpled. Piper became aware that her phone was ringing shrilly, rattling against the table.

"Sweetheart," Leo said, reaching out. Piper batted his arms away with a gasp, a horrible sob ripping out of her throat.

"I have to get that," she said, fumbling for the phone. Leo put his hand on her back instead, and the other one rose to cover his face. Hunched over on the couch like that, he looked older than he'd ever been. "I have to get this. It's Phoebe. She might have some - the kids are - " Piper's fingers shook as she swiped to answer the call. "Hello? Pheebs?"

"Piper," Phoebe said. Her voice was shaky, in clear distress. In the background someone was yelling, but Piper couldn't make out any words. "Thank God, I was so worried, are you okay? Where are you?"

"The club," Piper said. She looked over at Leo, whose shoulders were trembling.

"Why are you at the club? Never mind, you need to get back here," Phoebe said.

"Tell me." Piper cleared her throat. "Tell me what it is."

"Sweetie - "

"You tell me right now!"

Phoebe paused. "Oh, Piper," she said finally, her voice clogged with tears. "Oh, honey. We found a note. From Chris."

Piper's world narrowed down to a very small, fixed point: Leo's hand on her back, clenching and unclenching rhythmically, like he was trying to keep from forming a fist. "What kind of note?"

Phoebe sniffled loudly. "Just come home," she said, warbly and soft, "just come home. We need you here, Piper."

No, Piper thought.