Note #1: Lauren and BayC, yes, I'm still writing "Roll the Dice, Run for Your Life". Well, at least I'm trying to write. I seem to have hit the biggest writer's block ever, but I still have faith that I'll come around. After all, I can't keep them in domains of the Master of the Game indefinitely!
Note #2: Hjordis, I found it amusing that the WB writers may be using on the show an idea that I have already had: thanks for letting me know. :-) Now, if they could just take the hint and bring Phoebe and Cole back together... >
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"Amateurs!..." Piper grunted, waving her head as she looked at the sheet of paper she was holding.
For the past fifteen minutes, she, Phoebe and Paige had been browsing through the contents of the drawer Cole and Paige had brought from the library, and which was now resting on the coffee table, before Phoebe. Piper was still sitting on the two-seat couch, unwilling to leave Leo's side, but Paige had left her chair and was now sitting cross-legged on the floor, stretching her neck to look at the contents of the paper in Piper's hands.
"So," she said, looking up to her older sister, "your great-aunt wasn't a witch?"
"No. Just an eccentric old lady with a taste for the occult," Phoebe said, looking at the bunch of papers in her own hands, "although she obviously couldn't tell real magic from ordinary card tricks. Most of the things here are just harmless nonsense, but it seems that a few weeks before she died she finally bumped into the real thing."
She sighed and added, grimacing:
"The real evil thing."
"And, unfortunately to us," Piper said, sourly, "she unleashed it in the very house she was going to leave to us."
"What exactly did she unleash?" Cole asked, gravely.
"Well, I'm not very sure..." said Piper, giving the papers an annoyed look. "This thing is a mess: she didn't number the pages, didn't write any dates..." -- she sighed heavily -- "But it seems that she started to open a portal to some other dimension."
"Started to?" Paige asked, raising her eyebrows. "You mean, the portal isn't open yet?"
"From what I've read here," Phoebe said, "if the portal was fully open, we'd all be dead by now."
"But apparently Aunt Helen managed to set it ajar," Piper added. "And now someone is pushing their way through it."
"But you can close the portal... can't you?" Cole asked.
"There's a spell here," said Phoebe, showing a particularly yellowed piece of paper, "and I think it'll close the portal, but..."
Phoebe fumbled with the paper, unsure.
"But...?" Cole said, giving her an inquisitive look.
"I don't know," she sighed, uneasy. "I'd rather know more about all this before we start casting spells that were written by God knows who."
"You don't think it was Aunt Helen who wrote it, do you?" Piper asked, with a skeptical look.
"God, no!" Phoebe promptly said, dismissing the idea with a wave of her hand. "Trust me, this is the work of a professional; it's a first rate spell. But..."
Suddenly, a few ceramic plates came flying across the room, heading straight towards Piper and Leo. Without thinking, Cole raised his hand toward the plates, and they immediately turned into dust.
"Now, what was that?" he asked, giving the dust that now covered the floor an intrigued look. "Earth?"
"Uh-hu," Piper said, nodding. "Ceramic is nothing but cooked clay."
"You know," Paige said, "it seems to me that there are two different forces acting here. One wants us to kill us, and the other wants to help us."
"Well, if I have to choose sides," said Piper, "I'll choose the one that doesn't throw things at me."
"I think you're right," Phoebe said. "I..."
She felt a tug at her jacket, and looked to her right to see Ben sitting on the couch and looking up at her with a still drowsy smile.
"Hi," he said.
"Hi, sweetie," she said softly, smiling back at him and fondling his hair. "Mommy's baby is awake already?"
Ben looked at the jacket that covered him and giggled, patting it and saying:
"Dada."
"That's right," Cole said, smiling and reaching out for him. "That's daddy's jacket. And, guess what, daddy's freezing here: why don't you come sit next to me so that we can share the jacket?"
Ben looked at him, his brow frowning in a look of comic concentration as he debated the idea, then he said, already climbing down the sofa:
"No."
Paige giggled, and Cole rolled his eyes, saying with mock disappointment:
"Now my feelings are hurt."
When Ben reached out for the drawer, though, Cole promptly restrained him, saying:
"No, sir, that's not for you."
He tried to pull the toddler back to the sofa, but Ben protested loudly, struggling to get free:
"NO!!!"
"Hey!" said Cole, frowning. "What's with the attitude, young man?" He leaned forward so that his face was close to his son's and added, sternly: "Your mom and your aunts have work to do here, and we're not supposed to disturb them. Now, let's..."
He was utterly surprised when Ben looked straight into his eyes and said "No no no!" waving a chubby finger at him to punctuate his words.
Something in the way Ben said that made Cole hesitate. In his own babyish way, his one year old son acted as if he somehow knew something the grown ups didn't. He looked at Phoebe and saw that she shared his perplexity.
Phoebe turned to Ben and asked, gently:
"Sweetie, what do you want? Show it to mommy."
Ben turned towards the drawer again as Cole released his grip on him, and gave it an uncertain look. His dream had vanished the moment he woke up, leaving him only with the notion of what he was supposed to do there. The grown ups watched, tensely, as the toddler sucked his lower lip and studied the pile of papers inside the drawer, frowning slightly.
The seconds passed, and Phoebe had to fight the urge to reach out for her baby as she saw the tears threatening to pop in his eyes. Ben was getting disturbed and frustrated: this was so complicated! He was able to understand and follow simple instructions such as "wave bye bye" and "come here", but the task he had been given by the friendly stranger who had talked to him in his dream was way more complex than that, at least for a toddler. Just as he was about to burst into tears of anger and frustration, he finally spotted what he was looking for. He reached out for the piece of parchment and took it from the drawer: it looked no different from the others, but as Ben laid eyes on it he knew it was the right one. Then he circled the coffee table, went straight to Leo and showed him the parchment.
When Leo reached out to receive the parchment from his nephew's hands, Piper covered her mouth with her hand to muffle a cry of horror: she could see right through Leo's hand. Ben gave Leo an intrigued look and reached out to touch his nearly transparent knee with childish spontaneity. He patted it a couple of times with great curiosity, to make sure it was real, before Cole stood up and walked quickly towards him.
"Now, son," he said, while scooping Ben up, "Uncle Leo needs to rest."
This time Ben didn't protest, and snuggled in Cole's arms, slipping into the jacket this one had already put back on and nuzzling his father's chest.
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"Frederick and Anthony," Leo explained, after reading the paper Ben had handed to him, "were witches. They lived in San Francisco in the end of the 19th century, and they were good witches... until they decided to switch sides."
"They started to use their magic for evil?" Piper said, trying to help her husband. It anguished her to see the enormous effort he had to do to speak.
"No," Leo said, "they started to sell classified information to evil. Future Whitelighters, witches that hadn't received their powers yet... were being killed."
He took a few slow breaths before proceeding:
"Whenever someone was hurt or sick, weakened and unable to protect themselves, evil would know and attack."
"They were double agents," Paige said, twisting her mouth in disgust.
"Exactly."
Again, they had to wait for Leo to recover before he proceeded:
"Eventually, they were found out, judged and sent to this dimension they're in now."
"Some kind of hellish dimension?" Phoebe asked.
"Actually, no."
This time they had to wait for what felt like a really long time before Leo was able to proceed, painfully:
"A realm... out of time and space... Many penitent spirits... purge their souls there... They'd be allowed to come back... when they're ready."
"Obviously, they still need more time," Paige said, sourly.
"Well," Piper said, standing up, "I say we read the spell and send them back to where they came from."
"Amen to that," Phoebe said, standing up, too.
Leo only nodded his agreement; his eyes were closed again, and he had big black circles under them.
As Paige stood up and joined her sisters, Piper held the piece of paper in front of them so that Phoebe and Paige could read the spell, and they started to chant:
"Out of men's reach now you stand,"
A strong wind started to blow, coming from nowhere, and Cole held Ben tighter, tensely.
"Death can't touch you, but justice can."
Leo could feel life being slowly drained from him. The images of Piper, Phoebe and Paige became more of a blur every second, and the roaring wind that made each girl's hair fly wildly about her face was little more than a muffled sound in the distance to him. And through it all there was this feeling that something was wrong. Terribly, deadly wrong.
"Your words of deceit shall be heard no more,"
Then comprehension hit him like a blow, and his eyes snapped open as he finally understood what was happening there.
"It's a trap! STOP!"
The surge of adrenaline gave him strength to raise his voice over the noise, and Piper, Phoebe and Paige immediately stopped chanting and looked at him in bewilderment.
"It's a trap," Leo repeated, weakly. "That's exactly what they want you to do. You're not closing the portal: you're opening it further." Seeing their shocked looks, he explained, dejectedly: "You can't close the portal. No one could but..."
Leo gasped and his eyes grew round as a new revelation struck him. He looked transfixed as he slowly stood up, turning to Cole. This one had already stood, too, at this point, and he looked back at Leo in genuine confusion.
"Oh God..." Leo whispered, thunderstruck. "You are..." -- all color left Cole's face as Leo pointed at him with a trembling hand -- "You're..."
Leo faltered and Piper tried to catch him but, to her dismay, her hands didn't find anything solid to grab. He somehow managed to sit down at the couch again and gathered his final strengths to say to Cole:
"Read... the spell."
"I..." -- Cole winced in pain as Piper grabbed his arm forcefully, showing him the paper with the spell clasped in her trembling hand:
"Just read it," she said, between clenched teeth, almost out of her mind with fear for Leo.
"What if..."
"I don't care if hell is gonna break lose!" she cried, on the edge of tears. "Just read the goddamn spell and close the portal, and we'll deal with the consequences later!"
Cole looked at her, then at Leo, who, at that point, could barely be seen, so transparent he was. He handed Ben over to Phoebe and took the paper from Piper's hands.
"Out of men's reach now you stand,"
An unnatural silence fell over the house, a silence so thick that it felt like a presence itself. Even the snowstorm outside seemed to become ominously silent, the wind coming to an impossible halt. In the heavy silence that followed the only sounds were Cole's voice, Leo's ragged breathing and the crackling fire.
"Death can't touch you, but justice can."
Piper silently sat by Leo's side. Phoebe held Ben tighter, and the boy clung to her, hiding his face on her neck. Paige put one arm around Phoebe's shoulders, attempting to reassure her sister as much as herself. The fire extinguished without a sound.
"Your words of deceit shall be heard no more,"
A low frequency humming sound could be felt more than heard in the room. All eyes were turned to Cole, but suddenly he wasn't aware of them. The power building inside him was both thrilling and frightening, making his skin tingle and his heartbeat quicken. In the back of his mind, he wondered what was happening to him, but a deep feeling of inexorability silenced any questionings.
"Your evil deeds shall cause no more sore."
Whilst the reaction to Piper, Phoebe and Paige's chanting had seemed tremendous, it had been nothing compared to the effect of Cole's words. First there was a loud cracking sound. And then it was as if every damned soul in hell was in the room with them, crying and wailing. As the howling wind almost snatched the paper from his hands, Cole clutched it forcefully and proceeded, shouting to be heard over the noise:
"Darkness can't help you where you'll be sent."
He felt as if his head was going to split in two at any moment. His brain was on fire; the storm outside seemed nothing compared to the one inside his head. Drops of cold sweat rolled down his face as he proceeded, fighting the cold vertigo that threatened to take him down.
"Light won't take you back until you repent."
Somewhere in the distance he could hear Phoebe screaming, but he could no longer distinguish the words. Cole knees buckled; just as he was about to fall down, a strong arm was passed around his waist, sustaining him, and another voice joined his as he managed to say the final words of the spell:
"You'll regain your freedom when your souls amend;
Until then, exiled you shall remain."
As he finally managed to say the last word, Cole felt himself slip into the darkness, away from the blazing pain and the roaring storm, with something akin to relief.