Part Nine

Piper did not pass out until she was already in the ambulance and had given the EMT Victor's name and phone number. The last sound that she heard was of one of her sons continuing to cry, while the other maintained an eerie, worrying silence.

At the hospital, she took a swing at a doctor when he pulled the boys away, though she would not remember it later. Neither would she remember the fifty-seven stitches that were put into her stomach, and Piper guessed that that was a good thing.

The next event that she actually did remember was waking up in a hospital bed, the skin across her stomach feeling pinched and tight, her head swimming in dizzy, sick circles, and discovering both a police officer and her father standing over her bed. She put her hand over her hospital gown and felt the hard little ridges caused by the threads holding her skin together. "I wasn't pregnant," Piper said slowly. Her thoughts were disjointed, scattered across every corner of her brain, and it was a struggle to force them to come back together again. She looked up at Victor. "Was I pregnant?"

Victor exchanged a glance with the police officer. "They have her on a lot of pain medication," he said. "It might be best if this waited."

The police officer shook his head, though his eyes remained kind. "I really need to get her statement," he said as he pulled a chair up close to Piper's bedside. "This man could be dangerous." The officer leaned forward until he was able to make eye contact with Piper. "Mrs. Halliwell, your neighbors said that there was a second man with you as you left Mr. Mitchell's house matching the description of the man who helped you at the earlier fire?"

Piper did not know how much morphine was being sent through the IV needle in her wrist, but it vanished between one second and the next, swifter than smoke. She straightened in her bed, wincing and bracing her hand against her stomach as the stitches pulled. "No," Piper said. Behind the police officer, she saw her father straighten, but it didn't matter if he knew that she was lying. "We had a good Samaritan when the apartment caught fire, but he left." Piper hated to admit even that much, but the police had already taken her statement once earlier, when Dean had been standing right beside her. All the same, she took special care to make her voice much wispier and more confused than she was actually feeling.

The police officer looked solemn and kind. He also looked as if he was buying it. Victor, over the officer's shoulder, clearly was not. His eyes were wide, and he was making a series of gestures that either meant that she should pop out of the bed and throw a curveball, or that she should knock it off and start telling the truth. Piper chose to do neither, and instead focused hard on the officer's face so that he would not turn and learn for himself why her father was not a world class poker champion. As hard as the room still wanted to tilt back and forth like the listing of an uncooperative ship when she stopped focusing on forcing it to be still, it was not difficult to keep a slightly loopy expression on her face. She was even able to make her gasp of surprise sound convincing as the officer went on, "Ma'am, did you know that the man that you were seen with at the site of your apartment matched the description of a man wanted for murder?"

"No," Piper said. She didn't put too much effort into sounding aghast and upset; all that she had to do was picture Billie's face before her face. "What are you saying?"

"Two fires in a single day is more than a little suspicious, ma'am," the officer said, finally sounding as if he was growing exasperated by her ditziness. As long as he continued to think that she was coming by it honestly, Piper was more than happy to let him believe that that she was the second coming of Paris Hilton. "And this man could be very dangerous. If you know anything more-"

"I'm sorry. I don't," Piper interrupted him. "The fire at Henry's house started outside. I didn't know that anything was wrong until the smoke detectors started to go off." Piper wanted to get off of the bed and slink beneath it, realizing that she was essentially casting Dean out to sink or swim on his own, but the alternative was to send the San Francisco Police Department out hunting for Billie. The very thought of the carnage that would follow was enough to make Piper shudder. For the first time, a suspicious line drew itself down between the officer's eyes.

"My daughter's had a very difficult couple of days, I don't think that I need to tell you that," Victor said, stepping forward quickly from where he had been hanging back near the door. His eyes were speaking volumes to her above the officer's head. Piper could not afford to make eye contract any more now than she could have a few moment's before, when she still felt as if she was using a white-knuckled grip to hold the separate pieces of herself together. "Maybe we can all have this conversation sometime when she's feeling a little more clearheaded."

The officer nodded after a long pause, though he certainly did not look happy to be doing so. "I'll come back tomorrow," he said, rising to his feet and pushing the chair back. "I can't help but get the feeling that you're not being honest with me, Mrs. Halliwell," he said. So she was not quite as good a liar as she had hoped. After so many years of lying to everyone from traffic cops to Homeland Security, she really ought to be more embarrassed by that. Piper stared the police officer straight in the eye and willed a flush not to crawl up her neck. "You need to think long and hard about what you're doing to yourself and to your family if that's the case. You could be tangled up with a very dangerous character."

"You're not telling me anything that I don't already know," Piper said, sharper than she had intended, and harsh enough to make the police officer lean back and gaze at her through fresh eyes. Whatever new picture she was causing to be painted within his mind, however, he saw fit not to voice any of those concerns now. He nodded to her once, far more stiffly than the manner with which he greeted her upon her waking, and left the room.

Victor waited until he was sure that the officer was gone before he unfolded his arms from over his chest and back towards the bed. "Piper, what's really going on?" he asked.

Rather than answering directly, Piper cast a sharp-eyed glance around the room and made note of the two small figures that were not in it. "Where are the boys?" she asked. Piper could still smell smoke whenever she turned her head, and could not quite manage to convince herself that it was only because her hair needed to be washed.

Victor would not be deterred so easily. "They're both out in the waiting room," he said, "Piper-"

"You left them alone?" While lunging out of the bed had been a foolish fantasy only a few moments earlier, it was now all that Piper could do to stop herself from leaping up and running right out the door.

"No," Victor told her, his tone becoming testy for a moment. "They're with Amelia. The woman that I'm seeing." Piper sank back against the pillows and knew that there was a look of confusion spreading across her face. "I've been seeing her for the past six months, Piper. I've told you about her on the phone several times."

Piper pulled back even further. Her heart monitor, after a single sharp spike when she had not known where the boys were, settled back into a sedate rhythm. "I forgot." She barely even remembered those conversations now.

Victor sighed, and it sounded as if it hurt him. "You didn't want to know, is what you mean," he said. "You've been walking around in a fog for the past year, Piper." She opened her mouth to protest in spite of the fact that it was something that she herself had admitted to only hours before, but he cut her off before she could go forward. "We're all that we have left. Family, whether you like it or not."

Piper closed her lips tightly around the thousand hurtful things that could have escaped her mouth and gone flying around the room, like telling Victor exactly what kind of family that he had been to her over the years. She swallowed them back with difficulty, even though they cut her throat. "Sorry." Family. That meant more than just her and the boys and maybe Henry, she reminded herself. It meant more than revenge against Billie, too, though it still hurt her to think about too long. Being awake again hurt her, and not just being awake in the sense that she was no longer unconscious in her hospital bed. Colors were sharper, sounds were louder, and her head felt clearer than it had in months.

"No, you're not," Victor said. He sighed again and rubbed his hand over his face, making a rasping noise as his palm brushed against the stubble. Piper realized for the first time how tired her father looked, how tired and how old, and wondered how long he had actually been sitting by her bedside before she had regained consciousness. It was enough to cause a spark of guilt in her when nothing else could. "I know when one of my girls is lying to me, even now."

Piper tried to think of the last phone conversation that she had actually had with her father and guessed that it had taken place at least a month previously, and longer than that since she had seen him face to face. If she kept using so much energy on guilt, she was not going to have any left for Billie, and Billie desperately needed her attention. "So what's the verdict, then?" she asked, looking up at her father. Amelia. Piper wondered what she was like, since her dad obviously trusted her so much. "How much did I get smacked around?"

"Fifty-seven stitches, two pints of blood, and smoke inhalation," Victor said as if he was reading from a list. He was doing a good job of pretending that he was not worried, and if Piper had not noticed the stubble on his face and the fine trembling in his hands as he gripped the bed's railing, she might have believed it. "The boys had some smoke inhalation, and Wyatt needed a few stitches in his hand, but they've already been released. You've been in and out for most of the day."

"They're tough little guys," Piper said vaguely as she toyed with the edges of the hospital blanket. If she thought that her legs would hold her yet, she already would have been in the waiting room. "How's Henry?"

Victor's face shut down, letting Piper knew even before he spoke that it was a going to be a lot more in his case than a few days in the hospital, a few stitches, and a nifty new scar to go above the one from her C-section. "He's looking at some skin grafts," Victor said in a soft, soft voice. Piper thought that she might have liked it better if he had stayed angry with her. "And he might still lose some of the use in that arm."

Because he had helped her, even though he had not needed to, and because he was her family and as such had thrown himself between Billie and what the thing inside of her wanted. Piper closed her eyes and felt a few tears leaking out from beneath her lids before she was able to stop herself. Victor stopped talking abruptly in order to make a soft, shocked sound. Piper did not cry in front of him. That entire damnable last year notwithstanding, she rarely cried at all. It was a day full of firsts all around, and none of them were ones that Piper felt like getting used to.

Piper sat rigid in her hospital bed for several moments, hands clenched into fists at her sides and trying desperately to keep her few rebel tears from turning into outright sobs. The last thing that she needed was for a nurse to come racing into the room when she began to shriek, as badly as her patchwork stomach was beginning to hurt her. The displacement of weight on the edge of the bed, letting her know that her father was now sitting beside her, only made things worse. Piper put her hand against her mouth as she felt her first sob, put the other hand against her stitches as it hurt every bit as much as she had expected that it would. Very slowly and almost as if he expected that a snake was going to come lunging out of her hair and snap at him, Victor put his arm around her shoulders. His voice when he called her name was almost as hesitant. They didn't have a whole lot of experience in being a daughter or a father towards each other, and with every day that passed the chances that they would ever learn grew slimmer.

Piper only let Victor hold her, after a fashion, for a few moments before she pushed him away. Her eyes were still hot and felt as if there was sand being forced beneath the lids, but her cheeks were barely wet. She caught a glimpse of Victor's hurt look before he tucked it away again and shook her head. "It's not you. It's…I need to fall to pieces. I've needed to do it for a long time, and when I do I'm not to hold back. If I'm going to protect my boys, then I can't do it until I know that they're safe."

Victor cleared his throat and leaned away from her, though he still did not look happy about it as he did so. "You know," he said, wincing as if he already knew how ridiculous his words were going to sound, given the history between them, "you're only alone in this if you want to be."

He way trying, whether the attempt was a clumsy one or not. Maybe Amelia was a good influence on him, after all. Piper covered his hand briefly with her own. "The last person who tried to help me is waiting for a skin graft," she said. Piper would have gone on further had a flash of blue outside of the hospital room not caught her eye. Her mouth fell open. "Are those guards?"

Victor assumed a guilty look. "Believe it or not, the list of things that I needed to tell you about was so long that I didn't know where to begin."

Piper continued to gape at the officers that she could see standing just outside of the room. One of the men caught her eye and touched the brim of his hat lightly in acknowledgement. "Are they watching me or watching for Dean?"

Though Victor evidenced a moment of surprise and obvious displeasure to hear Piper referring to Dean by his first name, he pressed forward. "Dean, mostly," he said. "They think that he might have started both of those fires." Piper felt her face stiffen, though she had expected nothing else. "But you're not making a whole lot of sense, either. Given the nature of the fires and the insurance involved, it might be best if you stayed where you are."

Piper glanced towards her door and the two men standing just outside of it. "I'm a Charmed One," she replied. Emphasis on the 'One' or not, her magic was the one thing that no one had tried to take from her but herself. "I'll deal with it."

Victor looked uncomfortable at the mention of magic being used to break the law, but he chose to keep his thoughts on the matter to himself. Good for him. "Piper, are you sure that you know what you're doing?" he asked her.

Everyone kept asking her that. Piper felt herself bristling in spite of the fact that her head was still spinning from the morphine and the blood loss. Two pints, huh. The way that her entire body still felt disjointed and loose, not entirely under her control, she was still about a quart low. "Don't do this," she warned him, holding one hand out in a stopping gesture while she gripped the railing with her other hand and used it to pull herself further up in the bed. Every single stitch protested her decision to move or even to breathe too deeply at the same time, fifty-seven fire ants biting into her flesh. Much as she wanted to, Piper did not reach for the call button that would bring the nurse and more morphine to her side. Her head still barely felt as if it was screwed on all the way as it was, and she still had so much to do.

Victor colored for a moment, and Piper could see all of the things that he wanted to say to her moving behind his eyes, but he swallowed them back down. That was their way. "All right," he said, slapping the palms of his hands against his thighs before he slid off of the bed. Piper traced her finger through the dent that he left behind. "Am I allowed to tell you to be careful, at least?"

Piper's face remained solemn for a long moment before she felt the corners of her mouth lift up and into a slow smile. "Yes," she told him. "You are allowed to do that."

"Watch out for yourself, Piper," Victor told her. "You and the boys are all I got left."

That was remarkably close to making them sound as if they had been an actual family for the past thirty years instead of…whatever it was that they were. Piper cleared her throat into her hand and had to turn away for a moment before she was able to meet her father's eyes again. "You have Amelia," she said. "I have a good feeling about that one."

"You haven't even met that one," Victor pointed out.

"Witchy instincts," Piper replied. Off of Victor's look, she protested, "I could have those. You don't know what I could or couldn't have." That family feeling was crawling back into the room, slow and insidious, and right when Piper was in no position to run away, too. She ignored the pain in her stomach so that she could continue fidgeting restlessly in the bed.

Before Victor could reply, there came a clamoring from the hallway, the sound of three people shouting and then a body being thrown up against the wall. Piper did not know Dean so well by this point that she could pinpoint whether he was the one being introduced to the plaster, but she knew the sound of his shout well enough. "Oh, I crap /I ," she exclaimed before flicking her hands in the direction of the hallway.

The sounds of scuffling and shouting ceased as abruptly as if they were a part of a soundtrack that had been switched off without warning, leaving only the sound of one man breathing heavily. "What in the hell?" Dean said.

Piper pushed a few strands of hair back from her eyes and leaned against her pillows. "Dad," she said to her astonished father, "I would like you to meet Dean Winchester, my knight in shining armor."

"Traveling from town to town, righting wrongs and vanquishing evil wherever I found it," Dean said dryly as he walked through the door. "And if the helpless maidens are so overcome that they feel an urge to shower me with kisses afterwards, well, pushing them away would be downright unchivalrous."

"Vanquished?" Victor turned to Piper and asked her.

"Different kind of vanquished," Piper answered absently, watching Dean. "Helpless?" she asked.

Dean was peeking around the corner at the frozen guards. He turned back long enough to flash her a grin. "Figure of speech." Dean turned back to examine the guard again, who was still frozen in a grappling pose. He reached out and gave the guy a healthy shove, watching as he rocked back onto his heels and nearly fell, before he turned back to Piper.

"Was that what you did to me?" Dean asked. He jerked his thumb over his shoulder to indicate the frozen guard. "How do I know that it's not going to give me cancer or something?"

"You would be the first," Piper said, watching Dean closely. The glib, flirtatious words were not matching the man underneath, she reflected, and someone really needed to pull him to the side and tell him that she should not pin too many of his hopes onto a future as an actor. Piper might have been sleeping a heavy, drugged sleep for most of the day, but Dean did not look as if he had slept at all. There were dark circles beneath his eyes and stubble on his cheeks, and the odor of smoke trailed after him as he came deeper into the room.

Dean shrugged his shoulders once within his jacket, as if he was trying to throw off goosebumps, before he threw another glance over his shoulder at the frozen guards. "That's not right," he told Piper flatly before he pushed his hand out for Victor to take. "Dean Winchester."

Victor hesitated for a long, long moment before he finally accepted Dean's hand. His touch was light and wary, and he let go as soon politeness allowed. Piper, for her part, was glad that he didn't try to prove his status as protector by crushing all of the bones in Dean's hand. "The murder suspect," Victor said.

Dean's easy smile froze on his face only for a second. He was good at this game, ordinarily. "I'm going to start putting that on all of my business cards," he said before he moved his gaze over to Piper. "Little legal snafu that I'm still trying to get cleared up."

"Dean, this is my father, Victor." In the midst of hunting a demon that had done its very best to kill her twice in the span of twenty-four hours and wanted to turn Wyatt back to the evil that he didn't even know he was capable of, sitting in a hospital bed and, ridiculously, unable to take her mind off of the fact that her sister's spirit would show herself to a stranger but not to Piper, she still felt like a young woman introducing her father to her boyfriend for the first time. It was all that Piper could do not to clamp her hands over her mouth and give in to a peal of laughter that would probably sound more than a little crazed. She eyed the IV drip warily, wondering if there was not a lot more in the way of painkillers traveling down the length of its tube than she had originally supposed.

Dean cast her a speculative look as he stepped back from Victor. Piper first thought that the strain was showing on her face, until he saw the way that his eyes were moving over and over her body, from her head down to her feet, on an endless loop. Not surprising, Piper thought dryly, as her hair was a rat's nest, she was wearing a shapeless hospital gown, and could feel several swollen, painful blisters on her cheek that probably made her look as if she was halfway through recovering through a truly ugly sunburn. It was as if he became convinced that his eyes were lying to him every time that he started to convince himself that she was real.

"You were supposed to leave before the police showed up," Piper said softly.

Dean grinned at her, lopsided and with all of the cracks showing. "Didn't tell me to stay gone," he said. "We still have work to do."

Yes. They did, and that sentence alone endeared Dean to her more than any amount of honey-thick charm that he could have laid down. Piper straightened in her hospital bed and smoothed her gown down, feeling her face tighten for a moment as the stitches pulled. Both her father and her…her Dean, or her white knight, or whatever the hell he was turning into, watched her very closely. "Dad, I need you to take Chris until all of this is settled. He's not the one that the demon wants, he'll be safer with you."

"Glad to have him," Victor said, "but what about Wyatt?"

Piper glanced out the hospital window, where the sun was a glowing red ball, slowly losing its grip upon the horizon. "It only attacks at night," Dean said without needing to be prompted. It was almost eerie, how much they were beginning to read each others' minds.

Piper nodded. "Wyatt is the one that it wants." She struggled to refer to the demon as 'it', when in her mind it was and always would be Billie, the last person that she and her sisters ever should have decided to trust. "It's going to be drawn to any place where it senses that Wyatt and I are together." That made staying in the hospital more dangerous by the moment. Three was a magical number, a lucky number. It was only whether the third attack would sway in the demon's favor or theirs that remained to be seen. Piper took a deep breath before she said something that went against every single instinct that she had as a mother. "If we're going to set a trap for this thing, then Wyatt and I both have to be the bait. Nothing else will work." She forced her hands to unclench from the fists that she had tightened them into before she cut bloody stigmata into her own palms.

Dean's eyes were dark and troubled. Piper did not know if that was more of the unspoken wavelength that they were sharing or only proof that he was a decent person, for Victor looked every bit as distressed as Dean himself. Dean clenched his teeth together until a muscle in his jaw began to do a spastic dance and nodded jerkily, looking as if he would much rather be kicking the side of the hospital bed instead.

"Dad, will you go tell Chris and Wyatt that I'll be there in a minute?" Piper asked. She started to swing her legs over the side of the bed, winced, and then pulled a face as she made a half-hearted effort to comb some of the worst tangles out of her hair. Bits of ash floated down and into her lap. "I smell like the inside of a fireplace." She mourned for a second as she had to pull the IV and its sweet, disorienting nectar from her hand, but sacrifices had to be made.

Victor leaned down and picked up a shopping bag that had been sitting, unnoticed, by his feet since Piper had woken up. "I went and got you a few things after the doctors said that you were stable," Victor said, "since nothing at your apartment is usable."

Piper accepted the bag from him and peered at the clothing inside. "Thank you," she said, touched.

"You could have called me after the first fire, Piper," Victor said, his voice equal parts worried and reproachful, while Dean looked out the window and pretended that there was no family drama taking place within the room at all.

"I know," Piper said softly. She reached into the bag and pulled out a loose, soft blouse the color of coffee. "Thank you," she said again.

"Somehow I didn't think that you would be staying in the hospital until the doctors decided to release you," Victor said, his mouth twitching for a moment. "I'll go wake up the boys." With a final once-over in Dean's direction, he turned and left the room.

Piper peeked down her gown and discovered that she did not have a stitch of clothing on under it, though she had quite a few elsewhere. She stared in awe at the ugly, mottled bruises that surrounded all of points where the thread was wound through her flesh. Piper glanced up again and was not terribly surprised to see that Dean had not followed her father's lead and exited the room also. "Not a big believer in privacy, are you?"

The corners of Dean's mouth shifted, a half-hearted gesture. No one was ever going to believe his flirting when he was wearing those eyes. "And stand out there with the wax museum that you've set up?" he asked. "Not a chance." The smile fell away as Dean gave up even the pretense of being the skirt-chasing ne'er do well. "I'm not going to leave you alone."

Piper shifted by painful degrees until her legs were dangling, bared to the thigh, over the edge of the bed. Her skin was dotted here and there with bruises ranging from pea green to a shade of blue that was nearly black, and she could feel even more on her back from where the Billie-thing had taken such joy in bouncing her off of the wall. "Turn your back, then," she said as she resumed rummaging through her shopping back. When Dean hesitated, Piper quirked her eyebrow and said, "If you're looking for a free peep show, Dean, I think that you can do better than me right now." She rolled her shoulder, where a particularly unpleasant bruise was stamped right over the bone, for emphasis.

Dean snorted, but made a big show of both turning his back and shutting the hospital door. Piper even thought that she saw a faint blush crawling up the sides of his neck. She felt inexplicably better as she resumed going through the bag. There were so many levels of awkward involved in her father bringing her underwear, Piper reflected, that she just did not have time to go through all of them right now. She hoped that Amelia had done the job of selecting there.

After struggling into the underthings amid many muttered excuses and soft sounds of pain, Piper pulled the blouse over her head and then reached into the bag for socks and jeans. Victor had played it safe and selected clothing that was a size or two too large for her, for which Piper was grateful. She did not want to combine her stitches with the waistband of a pair of jeans that had to be painted on.

Loose or not, Piper felt as if she had been hit by a truck and then, on the way to the hospital to be treated for those injuries, had been hit by another truck. She lost her balance as she was struggling to get one leg into the jeans and fell sideways against the hospital bed, giving her hip a painful whack against the protective railing. With the substantial weight that she had lost since Leo's death, it felt as if the blow echoed off of the bone itself. Piper yelped and then closed her eyes tightly as tears of pain sprang up in them.

A pair of warm hands appeared at her back and her elbow, steadying her. Piper startled so hard that she nearly sent herself tumbling into the side of the bed again. "Dean!" she yelped, swatting his hand away and glaring. She could feel the heat of fresh color rising in her cheeks. "Keeping your back turned is not a complicated set of commands. Either one of the boys could do it." Strong words from a woman who could not put on a pair of pants.

Dean was looking at her face. Very determinedly, she noticed, he was looking only at her face. "Oh, please, if we wait for you to do it yourself, we'll be here all night and you'll wind up with another transfusion." Dean grinned at her as Piper glared. "You might be immune to my charms. Those nurses aren't."

If she was going to start looking differently at every woman who was completely undone by Dean Winchester's green eyes, Piper reflected, she was going to wind up isolating herself from most of the straight female population of the human race. Still. "I can do it," Piper insisted, and punctuated her next attempt by nearly falling over again. She sighed. As therapeutic as making things go boom frequently was, there were many days when she would not have said no to Prue's more refined and controllable abilities.

"You're an inspiration to us all," Dean said dryly. His mask of innocence was as bad as all of his previous attempts, and worse because this time she had the feeling that he was being transparent on purpose. "Piper, let me help. You're not exactly at your strip-teasing best right now, if that's what you're so worried about."

Piper wrinkled her nose. "I'm going to take that as a compliment," she said, and wondered if it was the checkered pattern of bruises marking up her legs and back that was apparently making her such a repulsive female specimen, or if Dean had snuck a peek at the stitches while she was not looking. Immediately afterwards, she caught herself and wondered why she wondered.

"Fine," Piper allowed grudgingly. "Consider me sweet-talked."

"You had to fall sometime," Dean said. "They always do." The flirtation in his voice did not match the worry in and around his eyes. He was going to give himself lines before he was thirty-five if he kept assigning himself to be the protector of everything and everyone. Piper would know.

She braced one of her hands on Dean's shoulders and hopped awkwardly while he helped her into the jeans, able to feel the play of muscle even through his jacket and shirt. It was time for more morphine; she had taken the needle out too quickly. Then Dean's hands were warm and gentle on her hips, callused from holding weapons for so long. They rasped at her in a way that did not hurt, that actually felt very good.

'Not even eight months yet.' It was not time for more morphine, Piper decided as she abruptly swatted Dean's hands away and finished buttoning up the jeans herself. Dean pulled back and stared at her with a puzzled expression. She had already had too much as it was, if it was going to keep doing funny things to her like apparently sucking her brain out through her nose.

"Okay, thanks, got it!" Piper exclaimed with a brightness that bordered on panic as she sat quickly back down on the bed. Feeling as if she was fully awake again after months had its disadvantages, such as noticing the deeply male scent of Dean that lingered beneath the smoke, a scent that she had not realized how much she missed until it was there again. She reached into the bag and pulled out the final item, a pair of socks.

"You sure?" Dean's tone indicated that eh fully expected her to tumble off of the bed and down to the floor at any moment.

"Yep. I am modern, independent woman, I bring home the bacon, I fry it up in a pan, and I put on my own socks." Phoebe had once babbled like this whenever she was caught and knew it. Piper was the worst person in the world, she was sure, for being unable to throw the smell of the man from her nose and the feel of his hands from her skin.

"So all witches do magic and have a screw loose," Dean said, half to himself. "Dad, you could have saved me a lot of trouble by mentioning that second part." A note sadness caught his voice for a moment, as if he had a burr in his throat. Piper was pretty sure that she had not been meant to hear that part.

She watched him for a beat too long before she shook herself and looked down at the socks again. "We all do magic," she corrected. "You're taking your chances on the crazy part." Even if the odds were probably in Dean's favor.

Getting the socks unrolled was no problem. It was the bending over to reach her feet and feeling as if she had just received a switchblade to her gut that was presenting something of a technical difficulty. Piper gasped so that she would not swear or let out the kind of screech that would draw all of the nurses in the building down upon them in an angry, syringe-wielding horde. If she was very, very lucky, the bead of wetness that she could feel rolling down her belly was sweat and not blood from a freshly pulled stitch. Piper rolled up the hem of her shirt so that she could look, noting with relief that luck was on her side for once. She winced as she realized that her new scar was going to be just an inch above the one from her C-section. Not on her strip-teasing best. Right.

She was still the worst person in the world.

"Oh, for God's sake. Here." Dean took the socks from her hands before she could protest and knelt in front of her. He eyed the stitches in her stomach before she could lower the hem of the blouse back down. "Sam did worse that than to himself on his skateboard, never mind fighting demons. And he wasn't half as much of a baby about it, either." He was a liar, but he was a sweet one. Piper wondered how many women had fallen on those two facts alone.

"I'm fine," Piper said, pulling a face. She reached for the socks again, only to have Dean hold them out of her reach as if the two of them were the world's largest pair of seven year-olds.

"So you've said," Dean replied. "And you made such a hearty squeaking sound to prove it. What makes you think that this is about you, anyway? Maybe I just have a foot fetish and you have cute ones."

Piper smiled in spite of herself. "Pervert," she said. She watched as Dean helped her with first her socks and then her shoes, brushing aside her protests with, "I have a shoe fetish, too. All kinds of kinks working here."

"Who's Sam?" Piper asked suddenly, staring down at the crown of Dean's bowed head. His shoulders hunched up towards his ears, a defensive gesture that made him look more like a young boy than a man just a notch or two beneath thirty. Piper knew that she still had some time to take the question back, and there was a part of her that supposed she ought to try. Only, Dean already knew why she was in this fight. It seemed fair that she should know why he was in it in return.

Piper had a bitchy streak. This was no surprise to her, but she thought sometimes that Prue would be proud of her if she had seen how well her younger sister had learned how to use it.

Dean straightened and met her eyes. Piper realized that she had been wrong when she had decided that Dean could not act. His eyes were still as sharp and green and beautiful as stained glass, but there was no one behind them. "My brother," Dean said shortly. He held out his arm to help Piper down from the bed.

"I can walk," Piper pointed out, feeling slightly guilty even though she could not say why.

The quirk of Dean's mouth as he glanced back at her was more like a spastic twitch than a real smile, but he was seated behind his own eyes again. Piper was glad of that, at least.
"About as well as you could handle the shoes?" he asked her.

Piper had to take a few steps, then, to spite him if for nothing else. She then took a few steps more, until the room stopped pitching back and forth as if someone had taken her hospital room and suspended it on a stormy sea. Now it felt more as if it was on a lake where there was a good, stiff breeze blowing, but that was an improvement. That much Piper could still handle, though she thought that the two pints of blood that had been poured into her had obviously been done on the assumption that she was going to lie on her back for the next few days until she managed to build up the rest on her own again. Piper snorted softly to herself and wondered how the hospital would feel about putting in an option for beefed-up super transfusions, for those people who just could not wait for piddly little things like having a doctor's clearance or being able to stand on their own.

Piper put her hand against her stomach and grit her teeth, focusing very hard on putting one foot in front of the other rather than returning to the bed and the IV that she had so foolishly pulled out. The guards at the door were just beginning to twitch as her distractedly-cast freeze wore off. Piper flicked her hands out quickly to freeze them again, harder this time, and ignored Dean's mutterings about tumors and epilepsy behind her. Hissing between her teeth and mumbling a few choice words of her own, Piper braced her hand against one of the officer's shoulders and leaned up so that she could murmur a few other choice words to him, this time with a far different end in mind. She repeated the process with a second officer and them turned to see Dean watching her with a quizzical expression.

"A little present for you, a little memory alteration for them," Piper explained as she took the officers' limbs and began pulling them back down from the positions that they had been in when she had frozen them, when they had still been grappling with Dean. 'If it actually works,' Piper could not help thinking, but she still felt more alert and alive than she had in a long time and thought that the chances were good. "If I'm going to go AWOL for a while, then it's probably better for you if you're not connected with my disappearance."

"Handy skill to have," Dean said as he helped Piper move the officers into positions that would panic them less whenever the freeze wore off. He paused and gave the arm of one of them, the burlier of the pair and the one who had thrown Dean against the wall, a long, speculative look.

"Don't put his finger up his nose or anything," Piper said, finishing and then standing back so that she could view her work. She and Dean had leaned the officers back against the wall, their arms folded over their chests, in postures that would let them think that they had done nothing more than doze off whenever they woke. She put her hand against her stitches, which felt as if they were on the verge of crawling right out of their skin, struggling to keep her face neutral. She thought that she was going to tangle with a demon powerful enough to shrug off all of her magic like a cheap parlor trick? How?

With force of will, Piper told herself. Force of will, pure mother-love, and the Power of Three. She would not be ignored.

Dean looked briefly wounded as he released the officer's arm so that he could step back to view the scene, his posture a near-perfect mirror of Piper's own. "What makes you think that I'm going to do that?" he asked her.

"Because my sister Paige used to do the same thing," Piper said as she turned towards the direction of the waiting room. 'And I can say her name without flinching,' she thought in Dean's direction.

They had only gone a few dozen yards before Piper saw a cluster of security guards that looked suspicious to her, said 'screw it', and flapped out her hands to freeze everything within her sight. With luck, she would wind up freezing the entire hospital.

"Think that maybe that's a little bit of overkill there, cupcake?" Dean asked her. He looked around at all of the frozen figures, swatted at a nurse's ponytail to send it swinging, and muttered, "It's beginning to turn into goddamned Ripley's in here."

"Language," Piper said before she remembered that there were no little pitchers around to hear them. She felt a faint flush crawling up her cheeks. "Anyway, an ounce of prevention, a pound of cure, and we don't have time to go back and correct mistakes." And because she needed to exert her powers over something, if for no reason than to burn off some of this excess energy before she had a meltdown, and she did not think that the hospital administration would appreciate it if she began to explode the gurneys.

"Is that part of an actual spell?" Dean asked. The way his voice sounded, a stranger would think that Piper was practicing magic of the Macbeth variety, maggots and all, rather than something more akin to twinkling her nose.

Piper ignored Dean's tone, saying instead, "Hang on," as she spotted a nurse's station. She walked around the counter and gingerly wheeled the frozen nurse, her hands still poised in midair, back from her computer screen. She typed in a few commands to get the result that she wanted before she looked up at Dean and said simply, "I have to check on Henry before we go."

Dean could have argued with her, could have thrown back her own words about not having time to make mistakes, but instead said only, "Okay."

Upon entering Henry's room, Piper discovered that it was as frozen as all of the rest of the hospital, and the lack of beeping and whirring noises from the monitors caused an immediate ridge of gooseflesh to run down her spine. She took a moment to steel herself in the doorway before she stepped forward cautiously into the wax museum that she had created. Dean remained behind her in the doorway, either to give her privacy or to escape the worst of the world's oppressive creepiness and watch the exit at the same time. Perhaps both.

Both of the room's chairs had been pulled up to Henry's bedside, and both of them were occupied by distraught older people that Piper did not know. She thought that they might be Paige's in-laws, thought she doubted that Paige had had a chance to meet them, either. The weeks leading up to her and Henry's impromptu marriage and the explosion at the manor had been a flurry of preparations for war. Piper dimly remembered Paige telling her once that Henry made such a devote parole officer because he had been a cog in the foster care machine when he was a child, and as such was determined to see that his mostly very young charges were not abandoned in the same way. If so, he must have found his way into a pair of good hands eventually.

Piper let her hand hover over the woman's shoulder for nearly a full minute before she closed it into a fist again, unable to bring herself to touch them even enough to pull them back and give herself more room. She slipped between the chairs instead. Henry was dressed in a hospital gown like the one that Piper had found herself in when she had woken up, but heavy bandages still protruded from his collar, wound up his neck, and hid the burn from view. Piper wanted in a perverse way to see it, this scarring brand that Henry had taken in order to protect her and her sons even though he had not needed to do it. She ghosted her fingers very lightly over the bandage instead before she took a seat on the bed and stared very hard at Henry's blistered face and cracked lips.

The eerie, perfect silence was about to send Piper running straight from the room, so she unfroze Henry and the machines that he was hooked up to, telling herself that as soon as the beeping changed she would go sprinting for the very first doctor that she could unfreeze, and exposure be damned. With the calm, steady beeping of the heart monitor in the background, Piper was able to collect her thoughts. If there was any part of Henry that was aware of her presence beneath the heavy drugs that he was on, she wanted him to hear what she had to say.

"I guess we'll start with thank you," Piper began, taking Henry's unresponsive hand in her own and staring down at it as she ran her thumb lightly across the knuckles. "For defending me and my boys tonight, for opening up your home to us, for…" Piper trailed off for a moment as she remembered all of the times over the past several months that Henry had agreed to watch the boys at the drop of a hat, a few times so that Piper could deal with magical threats that wanted to fill the power vacuum that existed in the absence of the Charmed Ones. More often, though, Piper had called him over because she had thought that if she not get a chance to be alone and to tend to the thoughts brooding in her head she was going to lose her mind altogether. "For keeping me sane, and for being my family, even thought I was doing everything that I could to ignore what I had left." That, and her magic. The willful ignoring of both was going to stop tonight.

Piper snuck a glance over her shoulder at the people who cared enough about Henry to rush to the hospital upon hearing that he was hurt. "It looks like you have a pretty good family of your own right here," she said. "But you're part of mine now, too, and we're notorious for not letting people go easily." Piper would never be sure, but she thought that she felt Henry's hand tightening around her own very slightly before she let him go and stood up from the bed. She refroze Henry and all of the equipment that was keeping him stable before she turned back to Dean.

The room was quiet enough so that he must have heard at least some of what she had said. "You ready?" Dean asked her, doing the courtesy of pretending that he had not.

"Yes," Piper said, and meant that she was ready to get on with a lot more than leaving a hospital room.

Everything in the waiting room was frozen except for Victor and the boys, as Piper had intended, including a tall, elegant woman with champagne blonde hair that was riddled with streaks of gray. This must be Amelia. She paused in order to give the new woman in her father's life a long, appraising stare until both of the boys noticed that she was there.

Chris gave a joyous shout and ran forward immediately, hurling himself against her with such force that he nearly bowled her over and then clinging to her no less forcefully than a barnacle did to the side of a ship. Wyatt took more time. He paused for a long moment so that he could regard her solemnly over the picture that he had been drawing before he got up and gave her a very careful hug. He was old enough now so that he could reach her waist rather than resorting to hugging her around her thigh, as his brother was doing, and even his most gentle embrace still hurt. Piper would die before she would ever let it show. She put her hands onto both of their heads ruffled their hair. Her boys. Her babies.

Without saying a word, Wyatt put his hand against her stomach, where it began to glow very faintly. "Oh," Piper said a moment later, feeling something in her stomach that was more like a nasty cat scratch than the deep gash that she had been sporting a moment before, and tightness from the remaining stitches. It wasn't complete healing. It was still much more than she had known Wyatt to be capable of yet before, and it brought to mind all of the different uses that the thing inside of Billie could find for him. "Thank you, sweetheart."

Victor stared at Amelia, who was caught in the middle of taking a sip of her coffee, and poked at her in the same way that Dean had done to the guards. He glanced up at Piper. "Your work?"

Piper nodded and continued to look Amelia over, memorizing the details. "She seems nice," she said finally. Amelia seemed very different from Piper's mother, was what she meant, but there were so many different ways for that to be interpreted wrongly. Piper was still pretty sure that she meant some of them.

"She is," Victor said, reaching out to take Amelia's free hand even though he must know that she could not feel the gesture. Piper wondered if he felt as if he was bringing home a new girlfriend home to meet the parents, and if the role reversal was giving him as many heebie-jeebies as it was her.

"Are you guys close enough that I should…?" Piper made a vague gesture that managed to convey that she meant unfreezing Amelia at the same time that she refrained from actually doing it.

"No," Victor said quickly before he realized that the answer might have come too fast and began to backtrack. "I don't think that she's ready to be that much a part of our family yet." Yet.

"Okay." Since Piper was worried about kneeling down onto Chris's level might do to her still-tender stomach, she instead took him by the chin and tilted his face up until his eyes could meet hers. "Sweetie, I'm going to turn you over to Grandpa for a little while, all right? Mommy and Wyatt and Dean have to go take care of some things, but we'll be back." Piper saw Wyatt out of the corner of her eye, also tilting his face up so that he could watch her, but, as was so often the case these days, he was choosing to keep his own counsel.

Chris had no such desire to be stoic. "No!" he cried as soon as Piper's words had a chance to sink in, clinging that much harder to her leg and turning his face into her thigh. Though his voice was muffled, Piper could still make out, "Go with you."

"I know you want to, Chris," Piper said, running her fingers through Chris's fine, dark hair. Both of the boys were wearing different clothes than they had been when Piper had seen them last and smelled of soap rather than smoke. Victor must have taken them by his apartment and given each one of them a bath when he had gone to get Piper clothes. "But there's a very bad thing inside of Billie that wants to hurt you, do you understand And Mommy and Dean are the only ones who can stop it before it hurts anyone else, but we need Wyatt to help us do that." For a lie-or near enough-that made her feel so awful inside, Piper found that her voice did not shake at all as she told it.

Chris pulled his face away from Piper's leg long enough to give his brother an awestruck and faintly worshipful look. Wyatt continued watching Piper's face for a moment longer, though surely he felt Chris's eyes on him, before he released her so that he could go to Chris and envelope him in a broad hug. Piper thought that he might even have whispered something to his brother; she could not be sure. Dean, she noticed, was watching the both of them very hard, though he turned away when he noticed her attention.

After a few moments of silent conference, Wyatt took Chris by the hand and led him over to Victor. Though Chris's eyes and cheeks were wet with tears, he did not fuss or protest any further. Piper privately thought that she would have preferred it if Wyatt had fussed just a bit more. Most kids his age and much older would have gone into hysterics after what he had gone through, and not come out of them again for hours. Piper thought of the moment when she had realized that the demon wanted Wyatt and not Chris, for whom goodness came so naturally and effortlessly if his future self was anything to go by, not Wyatt that she had had to fight so hard to conceive and then fight so hard to save. Her flash of rage was immediate, brilliant, and blinding. Had Billie been standing in front of her, Piper would have blasted her so hard that there would have been nothing left but her shoes.

She forced her anger down to a place where it could not harm her now but could still be put to use later and said to her father, "I'm going to release all of this," she waved her hand around to indicate the stasis that she had put the hospital in, "as soon as we're out of sight. If I don't call you by dawn and let you know how everything went, then assume the worst, take Chris, and get as far away from San Francisco as you can."

Victor looked pained, but said only, "Be careful, Piper."

"I will," Piper replied, only to find herself pulled into a hug before she could even think to pull away. Victor hugged her as hard as she could stand, both physically and emotionally, until Piper awkwardly hugged him back and pulled away. She wondered if the hug had been as odd fro him as it had for her. "Thanks for looking after them," Piper offered lamely before she took Wyatt by the hand and led him away.

"Don't," Piper said as soon as they had left the waiting room behind them for the hallway, because she could feel Dean's eyes on the side of her face. She glanced over, sighed, and said, "It's very complicated, okay? Too complicated to go into without several hours and a few visual aids."

"I know from complicated," Dean said, but then used it as an invitation for Piper to keep her silence rather than as an excuse to push her into opening up. She was grateful for that.

"Wait," Piper said suddenly, stopping by a frozen doctor and rummaging through the pockets of his coat until she came up with a prescription pad and a pen. She turned back around and faced Dean's raised eyebrows.

"If you want to raid the pharmacy, I'm pretty sure that it's that way," Dean said, pointing. "No need to go all stealth about it." His eyes flicked from the blisters that she could still feel on her cheeks to her stomach, a none too subtle way of telling her that she looked as bad as she felt.

"This isn't for drugs," Piper said as she clenched the pad and the pen in one hand and reclaimed Wyatt with the other. "One way or another, I'm going to make my sisters talk to me."

End Part Nine