Authors note: below the - - mark I had the song 'Chasing Cars' by Snow Patrol in my head. I think it adds to it (but that's just me so if you could overlay that too I think it would be good.

Thanks

Purple

Chapter 10

Home is where the graves are

Kara stepped off the plane at Birmingham Airport, back in England, trying to keep her mind off the white noise place in her mind, switching her brain back to the journey. The gossip she had picked up about the coffin in cargo, the happy stories of people returning home for weddings, birthdays and births or just from good holidays, the sad stories of funerals and betrayals. She couldn't sleep as Chris did for the blurred noise of thoughts she picked up, but for once she was glad, because it sort of blocked the white noise out. The only thing that seemed to work was when Chris woke and they talked and the actual talk seemed to block it out.

Occasionally she would glance at him as he slept and wondered why he was doing this, but she refused to prod, to search his thoughts, she kind of enjoyed wondering.

So she looked exhausted as she met Alice's parents, after checking on the coffin. She walked towards them across the tiles their thoughts deafening and the light bouncing into her eyes from the tiled floor seemed blinding.

She raised her head and saw the pain in the faces of the people who had been more like parents to her than her own mother at least had been, she felt herself stumble and would have fallen under the pressure of it all had Chris not stepped up and held her hand. He leaned in close "I know you're the mind reader, but I know you can do this." He squeezed her hand. She took this advice, straightening her shoulders and regulating her stride and drawing strength from the pressure of his hand in hers.

She breathed in as she drew close enough to speak but was broken off as Alice's mother Moira, engulfed her in a huge hug, as if holding on tight to the child their daughter had grown up with that they could bring Alice back to them. Kara could hear this thought in her head and nearly collapsed under the weight of combined grief, but stayed upright for them.

"Moira, Steven,...She's OK... as OK as..." she trailed off. How could Alice be OK? She was in a coffin, according to the airline she was cargo, when less than a year ago the two of them had sat crammed into a pair of economy class seats, laughing at the naff movie and now she had travelled back with a guy she barely knew, unable to laugh at anything and Alice was, to everyone else, just creepy cargo.

Kara shifted from foot to foot as they switched their attention to Chris. Moira turned and raised her eyebrow, and Chris knew where the habit was picked up from. "Moria, Steven, this is a friend of mine, Chris Haliwell. His mother...helped me after Alice died, and he wanted to come and pay his respects." Chris smiled quickly, understanding the point of her lie, after all how would you phrase the truth, but still not trusting himself to reply

The hearse was picking Alice up, taking her to the funeral home to clear up the mess, because her parents had wanted an open coffin. This wasn't something that Kara understood, before her father had died he had taken the chance to decide how his funeral would go, and had chosen a closed coffin 'so that everyone could remember what he was not what he had become', this flashed to front of her mind as the last time she had ever seen her mother, who had shimmered into the back of the crematorium and mocked the beautiful Wiccan ceremony. After she had appeared she disappeared just as quickly, for what reason and how she showed up, and how young she still looked even after ten years. The only estranged relative she had been pleased to see had been her sister Eve, and that had been cold and stilted due to the presence of the girls' mother, who hadn't known that they had remained in contact after they were separated.

She was dragged out of her reverie by Moria's voice "Would you like to go to your father's or come with us?"

"I...I think I'd rather go home. I want to say something and I need to decide what I need to say. I don't know if I can do that at her house, your house."

Moira seemed crestfallen but dropped Kara and Chris in front of a large Georgian house. "10.30 at Northern Hill on Tuesday, remember no black."

Kara smiled remembering her friends slightly morbid insistence, mostly to Kara that if she died first her funeral was to be an enjoyable experience, that no-one was allowed to wear black and that 'Rocky Road, Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream' was to feature prominently at the wake. It had been a joke at the time, but right now it seemed important that it was honoured just for the pure Alice-ness of it.

Kara had simply wanted it made sure she had a Wiccan burial like her father.

Chris pulled her away from her thoughts "This is your house?"

"One of 'em, my father played the markets to his advantage. I suppose it was personal gain, maybe that was why he ended up loving a demon. This is where we lived. I suppose this is the Williamson version of the Manor, except your house is full of people and noise and love and this place, this place is an empty, ugly, shell and I think it always was."

"So we gonna go into the shell?" Chris joked, trying to lift the mood.

"Well it's pretty and we need to sleep and change our clothes sometime, so we might as well."

She laced her fingers back into Chris' and wandered back up the gravel path to the house that she had left the year before after her fathers death and intended to never return to again.

She opened the door and led Chris into a dark, musty smelling house pausing only to tell him that she had never meant to return here, and that it still because she still somehow couldn't bring herself to sell it.

The place was dark, all dark woods, dark paints and blood red stained glass in the windows spread eerie light across the upper floors. It was like the inversion of the Manor, the place felt brooding and unhappy.

Chris spoke in a whisper with a kind of reverence he felt the place seemed to deserve. "What was it like to grow up here?"

"It wasn't so good, that's why I did most of my growing up at Alice's. Her parents sort of adopted me. It helped a lot when my dad died, it didn't feel like I lost so much because we were never so close in the first place. He taught me all about Wicca, but not about anything else, so it seemed more like loosing a tutor than a parent. In a way loosing Alice hurts more." She stopped and began again abruptly her voice straining in an attempt at brightness "You want to sleep? Eat?"

"I think I need to sleep, but I don't know if I can."

They headed up a flight of stairs that were as dark as the rest of the house and stopped in front of one bright room, with a large four poster, yellow walls, modern art prints on the wall and clutter on the surfaces. It seemed out of place in this house. It seemed real while the rest of the place seemed like some morbid museum dedicated to some lost, depressing past.

"This was my room, my dad caved in and let me decorate it how I wanted it when I was fourteen and I guess I never got around to changing it. I suppose with this colour scheme I'll never manage to sleep anyway, so it doesn't matter." She tried to smile again

"I'll stay with you if you want me..." he stuttered, embarrassed by the slip up "If you want me to? If it''ll help?"

"It'll help." she led him into the room

- -

As they lay together later she asked him a question

"Why did you do this? Coming here? We've only known each other a few weeks?"

"Because you saved me. Because you lost everything because that demon thought you were a threat, because you helped my aunts kill your own sister, because of the risk you knew she posed as soon as she had me and you still don't seem to blame me, because I didn't want you to go through this alone and because together we broke the Thrall and I think that has to mean something big, right?."

"And here's me just thinking it was because you were a good guy." she said playfully.

"I am a good guy!" he said, mock outraged.

They smiled at each other for a moment before Kara's eyes clouded over with pain again, as if the endorphins had worn off.

"I'm not normally this kind of a girl you know" she said quietly, ashamed.

"I won't tell if you won't" Chris said "And I'll still be here when you wake up, and after that if you'll let me." His voice was gentle but all the playfulness had gone from it.

"I don't know if I should hang out with you any more Haliwell, you get me into trouble."

"If you don't tell me to go I'm not going anywhere."

"Promise"

"I promise"

"Then I'm not going to tell you to go anywhere."

"Promise."

"I promise."

He kissed her and pulled her close while they settled to sleep.