"I give up," Piper said, dumping the crystal in the centre of the map irritably. She strode over to the couch and threw herself down on it, rubbing a hand over her weary and aching eyes.

She had been trying for so long, and no Phoebe. The crystal's spinning had been grinding her last nerve, and the rainbow it fractured the light into on the wall was far too jolly for the situation. She was missing a sister, and they suddenly had a big demonic crisis to deal with. Considering that the Powers That Be wanted the Charmed Ones to vanquish evil they could at least make it a darn sight easier for them.

"Are you okay?" Chris asked concernedly, leaning forward onto the table, toying absently with the chain though not taking his querying eyes off her.

"No, I'm not," Piper snapped back. "My sister is missing and my husband is AWOL and you are going for gold in Olympic Gymnastics in my stomach right now…" She shook her head, running a hand across her forehead in an ineffective motion and staring intently at the floorboards as Chris rolled again in her stomach.

Chris grimaced, realizing that his mother was in one of those moods that made apologizing futile. "Well, I'm doing that because you're stressed. Maybe you should go and rest," he suggested gently. "Me and Paige can handle everything from here…"

Piper looked up at him, removing her hand and cocking an eyebrow at him. "It's 'Paige and I'. And how am I meant to trust you two after what you did downstairs in the parlour?"

"Oh, come on. Would you rather we'd left it a mess?"

Piper scowled at the conflict the two notions made inside her brain. "Well, no, but I mean magic?"

The witch-whitelighter pushed back from the table and stood back up straight to his full height, folding his arms across his chest in a vain effort to look vaguely commanding. "Go lie down," he said sternly.

"Don't patronize me," Piper barked back at him. "I'm-"

"-not an invalid," Chris filled in for her.

She glowered at him, her dark eyes burning. "Got that in one. I'm only-"

He smirked at her, cutting her off again. "-pregnant."

She got up from the couch and smacked him on the shoulder. "I'm going to lie down. But only because you being a stupid smart aleck had given me a headache."

"Careful on the stairs," Chris said quietly as she exited.

"Okay, now you're pushing it!" he heard her yell as she made her way into the upper hallway. He rolled his eyes and crossed the room to the window, leaning against the wall and looking out over the street. It looked like it was going to be another hot day; cloudless and dry. The sun was already streaming onto the cracked tarmac of the road, and he knew that before long the tarmac would be shimmering with the heat.

He was stepped back from the brightness, almost hiding in the cool shade just beyond the sun's reach. This was the view he liked. He'd seen it plenty of times in the future, of course, but there were so many more high rises then. And a lot more smog. People really needed to take the global warming thing seriously in this time.

And besides, Wyatt had demolished like half the neighbourhood in an angry rage one day. Anything about three blocks west of here was a field of rubble. That really made a big difference to the view.

Wait… He squinted through the obtrusive rays and saw a figure in the shadows, just as he was. It looked like a small kid, leaning against the trunk of a tree across the street, his face dappled with sunlight and shadow that camouflaged him almost perfectly. If it wasn't for the fact that when the slight breeze that blew through the city from the Bay was moving the leaves in the upper branches, allowing small snatches of sunlight to gleam off what appeared to be a Matchbox car the kid was rolling around in the fine dirt he would have been invisible.

The kid only looked about four, maybe five. How negligent could a parent get to let a child that young play out in the street? Anyone could pull up in a car, and he'd never be seen again. There was a small brown object sitting next to the kid, and Chris couldn't work out what exactly it was.

It wasn't until he felt the heat on his bare arms, magnified by the glass, that he realized he had stepped in full view of the window to get a better look and the mysterious boy sitting there.

Chris moved to turn away. Someone would come along for him eventually. He didn't have the time to play social services right now. He had a little kid of his own to worry about – namely his brother. And saving him meant saving the future and so many lives, saving this one kid wouldn't do that.

Chris sighed, hating how cold he sounded. Sacrifices always had to be made. You couldn't save everyone all at once. Sometimes, one person was worth less than the lives of many people. It was the way things operated in the future, and he hated it. It sickened him and when he challenged it, people just asked him what he would have done. Would he have saved the lives of himself and twenty other people, or hung around for the one that had fallen behind and got them all tortured and killed? It left a bitter taste in his mouth. How could anyone play God and decide who deserved to live and who deserved to die?

But then the kid looked up at the attic window and met Chris's eyes, and Chris felt a strange jolt pass through him, almost if he was suddenly connected to the kid. There were freckles on the child's face, like he had been sitting out there for far too long in the sun.

Chris groaned, unable to look away from the child's unnerving gaze. He shouldn't be doing this right now. They were in the midst of a demonic crisis, were one sister down and still had Wyatt to save before The Deadline… It was odd, he was suddenly so connected to the midget sitting there in the dirt, like the kid was looking into him or something… And as the toddler looked away and started running the car through the dirt again Chris saw innocence. And Phoebe could take care of herself. He knew that from experience. And this kid was so lost and alone…

To be honest it was creepy, but that face held haunted pain. It was an expression he had seen often growing up. But not usually on someone so young… That was why he felt so connected to him. It was like looking at a smaller version of himself.

He walked backwards away from the window, and the kid's eyes didn't vanish from his mind until he was tiptoeing past his mother's door and down the stairs. The feeling was only just starting to dissipate and Chris wondered if it was more than just a feeling as he opened the front door and stepped out into a wall of heat on the porch, looking towards the tree uncertainty before taking a deep breath and making his way across the street.

An innocent was an innocent after all.

Don't Look Under the Bed

Paige didn't know where exactly she was. Just that it was dark, and there was some kind of thick ash on the floor that she kicked up whenever she walked. It kept making her sneeze. There were huge objects littering the floor as well, and she kept scrambling over them to keep going in a straight line in the direction of the light. Light spilled in front three places, one in front of her that she was aiming for, one behind her and one to her right. She sneezed again as she walked, tripping over something on the floor and falling flat on her face.

She got up and found herself in the middle of a large round object that was gleaming in the faint light. At the top of the loop there was something protruding, and she crossed the space in eleven or twelve strides to go and investigate. It took her a while to get a foothold on the slick, cool metal but when she did she scrambled up and over the rim, falling onto the carpet of ash in the other side. The particles were scarily large as they drifted around her head, she noted. It must have been some fire.

The object at the top of the loop was a huge expanse of shimmering translucent green. She touched it and it was hard and smooth, and she could see all of the cuts in the stone. It had been made like this for some reason… She moved along the space and there was a smaller one a little along the band to her left, and suddenly a terrible feeling hit her. Shifting along with her hands still on the metal she found another stone to her right of the large one. They were enormous peridot. Swallowing and stepping backwards she set down heavily on a gargantuan black cylinder.

Peridot was her birthstone. She had three of them set into ring Glenn had given her before he married Jessica. But she'd lost the ring, and she had been hunting for it for such a long time…

She pushed herself off of her seat and walked the length of it, realizing that there were gold letters on it. Tracing her hands over the letters she read them off one by one. "M-A-Y-B-E-L-L-I-N-E… Maybelline? As in Maybelline New York?" She scrunched up her nose in thought. She had lost this mascara a long time ago. She knew it was hers, because of the chip taken out of the gold 'Y'. Paige sighed, putting her head in her hands in confusion. She had resigned it to being somewhere on Phoebe's vanity table and had bought a new one. Was this some kind of lost and found realm? But it had been much, much smaller when she had lost it...

She looked out at the light spilling in, and then looked up. And then, suddenly, she knew where she was. "Oh, man… You know what, Toto? I think we're still in Kansas."

Don't Look Under the Bed

A car drove past as Chris waited on the sidewalk for a chance to get across the street. When it had passed he looked up and down the street to see if anyone else had noticed the boy sitting there in the dirt. It didn't look like anyone had. Not many people were about, but not one of them had looked at the child yet. On closer inspection Chris could actually place the child at around six, perhaps seven at a stretch and as he crossed the street the child ignored him, making engine noises with his lips and running the car around in circles.

"Hey," Chris began, looking down at the kid. The child looked up at him for a couple of seconds and Chris saw an expression and hard lines that shouldn't be on anyone's face, let alone one of a seven-year-old. The kid had unruly brown hair that looked dirty and kind of matted, and there was a smudge of the dirt he was playing with on his freckled cheek.

Chris licked his lips, unsure how to proceed. He couldn't get over the way those eyes seemed to be so… colourless. They were grey with perhaps a hint of blue, but they were so blank and they just had untold sorrow in them. The kid was driving his car around the brown blob Chris had seen from the window – it was a stuffed bear.

"So… What's your name?"

He got more car noises in reply and he was tempted to go back into the house to work on the latest demon crisis and wait for the kid's parents to come and claim him. After all, he did have to work out what the fuoco demons plans were, and soon before another wave was sent after them.

"Kaden," the boy replied to the floor, running the car back and forth through the dirt.

"Cool. I'm Chris."

The witch-whitelighter squatted down, and both his knees cracked. Chris winced, pulling a face. How could he be showing this much wear and tear at twenty-two? Kaden didn't notice but then he looked up and Chris felt a headrush that threatened to knock him backwards off of the curb and into the street. The watery grey eyes flashed with their first display of pretty much anything since Chris had seen the kid, and they fugaciously flashed a gentle green. Chris blinked and the eyes were grey again, with the kid's head tilted towards him, his mouth set in a hard line. It had to be a trick of the light, the reflection from his own eyes ending up in the kid's colourless ones.

"You're like one of the ladies who live in that house," Kaden finally told him with a nod, pointing towards the Manor as the light-headed feeling began to fade. Chris rubbed the back of his neck. Something weird was going on here. This kid was doing… something. He wasn't altogether sure what, yet, but he was pretty sure it was magical.

"Yeah, my mom lives there. People say I look kind of like her."

Kaden shook his head. "No, inside."

Okay, this was getting so weird. What the hell was the kid going on about? The Matchbox car was lying on its side, abandoned. Kaden caught Chris looking at it and picked it up, shoving it safely into his pocket.

"What do you mean?"

"You're two people," Kaden said, "smushed together." The kid brought his hands together and interlaced the fingers tightly. "But don't worry, because one of the ladies is too, and she's a good people."

Did he mean Paige? Was he referring to the fact that they were both witch-whitelighters? Or was it just that the kid had a really weird view on how babies were made? No, because that wouldn't account for why he said that only one of the 'ladies' was two people 'smushed together.' Chris felt a headache forming. His throat was dry from breathing in the fine dirt the car's wheels had been stirring up and he swallowed, tasting the grit. Also, the back of his head was in the sun and it was rapidly burning, whilst the bulk of him was safe in the shade under the tree, which was not helping to make him comfortable at all. And he didn't want to move towards the kid lest he scare him off, so he'd just have to deal with some kind of uneven tan.

"Will you make me disappear?"

Chris blinked. "Huh?"

"I've seen you. You can disappear by going twinkly. Will I disappear?"

"Uh…" Chris blinked a few times, lost for words. This was getting nowhere. And he had a pain in the ball of his foot rapidly spreading to his Achilles tendon. He shifted slightly and his sneakers made a harsh noise against the dust. This kid obviously knew about their magic, and Chris would go as far to say that the child probably had a power of his own. Some kind of power-reader… "Do you want to disappear?"

Kaden sniffled and his eyes became more distant and began to shimmer, and when he looked up at Chris and shook his head solemnly Chris could see the reflections in the lachrymose eyes.

"No. Mommy and Daddy disappeared."

"When?"

"I don't know…" Kaden looked up and down the street, and then got up and crawled closer to Chris, whispering in the witch-whitelighter's ear. "The monsters got them." Kaden crawled backwards, pressing himself against the bark of the tree and trying to get back as far from Chris as was possible and still continue the conversation.

"Monsters?" Was he talking about demons? Because if he was, the last thing Chris needed was another demonic crisis, with a vanished father and only one really functioning Charmed One to deal with it. He hadn't even got to the bottom of the first one of today yet.

Kaden nodded. "Yeah. They live under the bed."

Ah. Chris couldn't deal with the monsters that could be vanquished with a nightlight either, but he knew Piper could. Many a time the witch had been up in the middle of the night, surrendering her bed to Chris and his irrational fear of the monsters under his bed, always soothing him gently back to sleep with assurances that she would always be there to stop anything happening to him.

It didn't matter that she had been wrong, and she had left him to fight for his life against his brother – all that mattered was what she had done for him, and he loved her for it.

It suddenly dawned on him that, because there were no such things as monsters, the boy's parents had probably run away and left him, and he had just assumed that his childhood fear had taken them. It made him mad to realize that parents couldn't face up to their responsibilities. Perhaps they had suspected, as he was suspecting now, that Kaden was somehow magical and that was why they'd dumped him.

"Do you want to come inside?" Chris asked, the pain in his feet being replaced by pins and needles.

Kaden looked terrified and shook his head. "No!"

"O…kay… Why not?"

"Cuz the monsters are in there."

"They're not…" Kaden looked at him. Chris didn't know a seven-year-old could do sceptical. "Well, there are a couple. But it's okay. I won't let them hurt you." And he meant it. He was not going to give this child cause for anymore suffering, even if it meant fighting off that entire demonic attack from this morning all over again.

Something about his voice and expression must have shown that Chris was sincere, because Kaden then nodded and grabbed the bear by the arm. Its other three limbs lolled limply as the kid rose from the dirt and then looked down at Chris, who was still crouched in it. Chris made an effort to get up but fell backwards off of the curb and into the street as his left foot completely failed to obey him in any way.

Kaden stepped next to the witch-whitelighter lying on his back between to parked cars and leaned into Chris's line of vision, blotting the sun from the witch-whitelighter's eyes, his face still showing no emotion.

Chris blushed and cleared his throat. "Just a minute, kid, okay?"

Kaden chose to nod rather than speak again, and Chris hauled himself off of the tarmac and onto his feet. His knee buckled unexpectedly and he grabbed for the mirror of a car next to him. He realized that he couldn't feel his calves and he wondered why the hell he'd chosen such a dumb position in the first place. He put a hand on Kaden's shoulder to help him across the street, but the child shrugged it off and looked both ways before crossing himself.

It didn't make sense. Why would the parents teach him something like how to cross the road if they were just going to abandon him? If they didn't want him, they why teach him something that was going to help in his life? This was all very confusing.

Kaden hung back on the porch as Chris opened the door, suddenly looking petrified again at the prospect of crossing the threshold. He shrank back from the doorway, backing out of the porch and down the steps, clutching the bear to his chest.

"It's okay. I promise."

Apparently Chris's most sincere promise, although adept in getting Kaden on the same side of the street as the Manor, would not get the kid inside the house and he continued to back away from the door, shaking his head. Chris felt so helpless as Kaden even let out a whimper. Kids… Kids were so not his forte. He had no idea how to console him and make it better. They confused him so much and even though he could feel his heart going out to the fear and pain he couldn't work out what he was meant to do about it.

"Chris? Is that you letting the heat in?" Chris turned to see Piper skirting around assorted debris on the parlour floor, a tub of ice cream in her hand, a spoon at the ready in the other.

"I thought you were lying down."

Piper flicked her eyebrows up and down, gesturing with her spoon. "I thought you were scrying for Phoebe."

"Touché."

Piper looked around the door and saw Kaden, looking so small and pale even under his freckles, clutching the bear to his chest in a death grip as if it were going to protect him.

"Any reason you're dragging children home?" she asked, taking a spoonful of ice cream to her mouth. She observed Kaden again. "Not only that, but you're scaring the poor little guy to death. What's the matter, sweetie?"

"Monsters."

Piper rolled her eyes, dug the spoon into the carton of ice cream up to the handle and licked off all of her fingers, slamming the tub onto the table. "Oh, a titchy innocent. Just what we needed. Thanks, Chris."

Chris shrugged weakly. "Hey, you don't choose innocents. They choose you."

Piper narrowed her eyes at him. "I have a funny feeling you're quoting me, so I'll let that one slide."

"It's okay, don't worry…" Chris tried to coax Kaden over the threshold, but the abject terror had the kid frozen, unable to even back away anymore.

"The monsters," Kaden whispered again, shrinking back from the house despite the appearance that his feet were cemented to the path and into the shell Chris had seen as he played.

"There are no monsters here, honey," Piper said, extending a hand. "Just us. You like cookies, right? Well, I just made a whole batch, and you can have some if you come in."

"You made a whole batch of cookies?" Chris demanded, turning to her. "When?"

"The other day, when you were all out of the house so I wouldn't have to try and cook with requests to lick the bowl or the utensils or have them disappear the moment they were put on the cooling rack."

Chris pouted. "You could have told me. I am your son…"

Piper smiled brightly. "Got it in one."

"I did a bad thing."

Piper, startled, looked out into the porch at the kid. He had walked closer to the house determinedly, but his knuckles were white as he held the bear's leg in a vice grip, tormenting the stuffing within.

"What was it, honey?" Piper asked, crouching down to look him in the face. Immediately she was overcome with such a wave of nausea she had to grab at the doorframe for support. Prescott Street blurred in and out of focus and the sunlight suddenly seemed way too bright. She could have sworn she saw Kaden's eyes flash a deep brown, but then she had to close her own eyes to stop herself from falling over.

Chris slid down the wall beside her, his eyes closed. A soft moan escaped his lips as the foyer and parlour lurched sickeningly, and his head felt detached from his body, so light and separate, and small floating blobs of colour danced across his vision.

The street suddenly stopped spinning and Piper was left clutching the doorframe so hard that her own knuckles were white, and it wasn't just the weather that was making sweat bead her forehead.

Kaden stood on the porch, watching with mild interest before swivelling his eyes over to the flowers growing up the side of the porch.

"What the hell was that?" Piper demanded, glaring at Chris who was all but passed out on the floor next to her.

Don't Look Under the Bed

Wow, thanks for all of your great reviews. Doesn't mean I wouldn't like a couple more though – heh.

Right now it's coming to the crunch time. I have exams starting May 11th, and from there on there is no going back at all. I've got to sit through the lot and pass the lot if I want to do anything other with my life than flip burgers. So writing is going to become more and more difficult as my stress levels rise. I do have a two week Easter break coming up on Wednesday, but I'm going to Paris over the Easter weekend and won't be available for anything, which means that I won't be able to do any revision and I really have to revise otherwise I'll end up getting rejected by McDonalds or something. So updates'll be as and when. Just wish me luck – it's all over by June 27th!

Twisted Flame

Aldrea7: - Oh, it's not that long. Heh. See, you can do it? I'm so very proud of you. And it's a double 'N'. Thank you!

Leigh1986: - Heh. It's been a while. Oops. Hope you liked. Thanks for reviewing – I really appreciated it.

Stony Angel: - Aw, thanks, hun. Love you!

mizunderstood writer: - Soon in my language or soon in yours? Heh. Sorry… Thanks for the review, though!

As Always: - I know, it should have come sooner. I'm sorry! But I hope you liked this chapter. You're really kid – thank you!

Claddagh Ring: - You know, oddly, this wasn't written early in the morning for once. Perhaps that's why it took longer. I just haven't had enough energy to stay up that late recently.

chattypandagurl: - Aw, thank you!

Aron: - Heh, ya think so? Thanks!