Death lurking within

Chapter 4 – Results

A/N: I won't be able to write for the next few days so I thought I'd better get another chapter of this out before anyone wants to kill me. Didn't update sooner because I had a major writer's looming over my head which prevented me from getting anything done. I just hope it's off now…

Disclaimer: Writing these things gets boring, because all the creative ways of saying this have already been discovered and used by people who are much smarter than me. That does give me an inferiority complex. That, along with the fact that I don't own Charmed.

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"What the hell is going on here?"

Piper Halliwell's loud voice cut through the silence the current events had caused in both her older son and her niece. Naturally she had no idea what the current events were, neither that these two were related to her anyhow, but the fact that they were both sitting next to a figure that was lying on the ground which she could not identify from were she was standing was enough to give her a bad feeling.

Something seemed to be odd with these two.

She was standing between her youngest sister and her husband on whose other side her other sister was standing as well. They had scryed for Chris and orbed right to the place were they had detected his supposed whereabouts, yet they didn't see him anywhere around.

Unless… the oldest Charmed One was the first to realize that it was very possible that she knew the figure lying between the two intruders from the future.

Wyatt didn't turn around when he heard his mother shouting. It was not like it was any of her business anyway. Well somehow it was, but she was not yet Chris' mother, not even close to being so, which in his opinion stripped her of any right to know 'what the hell was going on'.

Couldn't they have chosen any other moment to come here? Or even better could they have not come here at all? Apparently the world didn't like him. At any other moment he could've stood up to them, made sarcastic comments and annoyed them to no end. Any other moment he could've faced them, but not right now. Right now was the worst possible time for him. He could barely wrap his mind around the possible fact that his brother could be dead but now he was supposed to explain this to his family from the past who didn't know either of them had anything to do with the Warren line? That was not fair.

Piper on the other hand was not in a very patient mood. She stepped closer, but could still not see who was lying on the ground, so she repeated her demand, "I asked, what is going on?" The quiet and growling tone of hers made evident that she had no intention of spending a lot of time on interrogations.

Wyatt still didn't move. Couldn't she just go away? But he knew his mother and the rest of the family and he knew exactly how persistent they could be. But he could be stubborn as well. He was not going to make finding out that easy.

"Are you deaf?", Piper asked bluntly after she had spent some more minutes waiting for an answer she was not going to receive.

Finally Wyatt turned around and answered in an icy voice that still could barely hide his red eyes, "No. But this is none of your business"

Just a moment too late he realized by the shocked look on Piper's face that by turning around he had given her an open view on the body of his younger brother which looked far from pretty courtesy to the horrible disease.

"What did you do to him?", she asked in a voice that was almost an octave higher than the voice she ordinarily used. She could only see the face of their young whitelighter but that was more than enough. He looked so awful that she could barely manage to keep her breath steady, which was usually not something she had trouble with. She could barely recognize his face in its current state.

Wyatt wasn't really sure what to answer. "Nothing", he said stubbornly, even though that was far from true. If not for his efforts to save Chris he would still be alive, so nothing was barely the word to describe it, but Phenola, the only person who knew about his true actions did not protest to his statement.

"Nothing? Are you kidding me? If you did nothing he wouldn't look like that!", Paige half-yelled, while she was uncertain whether the young man in the grass was still alive. He sure as hell didn't look that way.

"He was sick", Wyatt said simply. He didn't have the nerve to tell the entire story right now. And he didn't want to talk at all at the moment, still he didn't have much of a choice, since he knew that the Charmed Ones were prone to doing stupid things if they didn't have the proper information.

"Was? Is he dead?", Paige asked considerably less loud. She did not like the sudden use of the past tense the young man in front of her was showing. This did not sound too good.

"Yes. Happy now?", Wyatt asked in a voice that could not have been more filled with loath and hatred. It was not that he hated them altogether, but at the moment he could not take responsibility for his actions. At the moment he was just so not up to anything.

This revelation shocked all of the people from the past. How could their neurotic whitelighter just be dead like that? He was way too young for that.

"You killed him, didn't you?", Piper asked with a glare towards her older son of whose true identity she had no idea.

"No, I didn't", Wyatt said in a quiet but threatening voice that he usually used on his minions when one of them was out of line. Of course that was not really true, but the complete truth was stinging in his heart enough without them condemning him for something he had only done to try to safe his brother.

Paige didn't know exactly what was a good thing to say right now, since the given news were unsettling her probably even more than her sisters. She had always liked the young man better than her sisters had, because he was about her age, and half whitelighter as well. And she didn't believe this man whoever it was that he had not killed Chris. She couldn't imagine any disease that would make their victim look the way Chris did at the moment. "Who are you?", she demanded bluntly.

Wyatt glared at her. For what seemed the hundredth time he wished none of them were here, but of course that was useless. "I am Wyatt Matthew Halliwell, also known as the source of all evil in my time", he said, only to shock them, since he did not designate himself that way, but he knew that would silence them for a moment.

"What?", Piper almost screamed. That was her son? He was the source of all evil? Immediately she regretted her past behavior towards Chris. He had told them the truth, Wyatt would turn evil, and she had told him to piss off. And now he was dead.

"Yeah, and it gets even better, mom", Wyatt said enraged. He spit out the word mom as if it was a disgusting thing to say. "Chris is my baby brother."

For a moment Piper was completely frozen, while the neurons in her head were spinning, trying to make sense of what she had just heard. Chris was Wyatt's brother. That meant he was…

Her son.

And dead.

Her second son had died before she had even known of his existence. "No", she whispered weakly with her eyes fixed on her younger son's face.

Wyatt felt a weird sense of satisfaction when he watched his mother being devastated by the news. So she would finally shut up. He decided to rub a little further. "And from what I know from his stay here, all of you treated him like crap. While he was about to die!", he stated angrily. He didn't know why, but being mean to someone else made it somehow easier for him to deal with his sibling's demise. Even though it was not really dealing, but more of a distraction from his own feelings.

That silenced the others. It was true. They hadn't known who he was and they had treated him so badly. There was no excuse for their behavior.

"Since when was he sick?", Phoebe asked while she was trying to fight back the tears that were trying to push their way up to her eyes. This was really a lot to handle for this short a moment.

"Since he was ten", Wyatt said, now more quiet himself. They understood now. At least a little bit and that meant the interrogation was over. On some unconscious level he was very grateful for that.

"Oh my god", Piper whispered, lost in thought.

"Yeah. And now excuse me, I'm leaving", Wyatt announced out of a sudden change of mind. He took his brother's hand and shimmered out immediately.

"Hey!", Phenola yelled. She had been quiet through the entire conversation, trying to process what had just happened, but now this was too much. Wyatt couldn't just shimmer out and leave her behind. Luckily her demonic senses were picking up, where the older man had gone, so she shimmered right after him, Leaving the Charmed Ones and Leo in confusion.

"Where'd they go?", Piper half asked half yelled while spinning around suddenly to her husband.

Leo was completely stunned by everything that had been said now, but he knew that tone of Piper's and immediately closed his eyes in an attempt to detect the new whereabouts of his older son.

He reopened his eyes after some seconds and declared, "I can't sense them"

"Then orb us back to the manor, so we can scry for them!", Piper commanded and grabbed her husbands hand without waiting for a response.

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"Why isn't it working?", Piper yelled.

They were back at the manor and had been scrying for almost an hour now, but to no avail. This was straining on Piper's nerve. At the moment her sisters were down in the kitchen and trying to mix some 'detection potion' of which they did not have a big hope to succeed. Piper was in the attic with Leo, who seemed to be frozen in place and hadn't said anything in over 20 minutes.

"I don't know", the elder replied shyly.

Piper let the crystal drop down on the map she had been using. She let herself drop on the sofa next to the table and finally she wasn't able to hold the tears back anymore which she had been pushing back ever since they had arrived back at their home.

"This is impossible", she stated through her sobbing and covered her face with her hands.

"What do you mean?", Leo asked, even though it was pretty obvious to him what his wife meant.

"I mean, we can't do anything!", she yelled and kicked the table leg in frustration. Leo saw this as his cue to do something. He went over to sit next to her and put his arm around her.

She pretended not to notice him and went on, "We are just being faced with all the results and can't do a thing about it. I mean Chris is dead and he's our son and we've been horrible to him and all this is just falling down on us like that, all the information, and still we can do absolutely nothing"

Leo knew she was close to hysterics and her ranting wasn't helping him either.

"Well, you didn't treat him the way I did", he contradicted. "You didn't mistrust him and follow him everywhere all the time. You didn't tell him he wasn't family, and on top of it, you didn't yell at him and argue with him just some hours before his death when he was already looking more pale than ever before"

"He was pale?", Piper asked confused. "You knew he was sick?", she asked, a little louder than before.

"I didn't think it was something serious", Leo defended himself. But he felt as if he was lying to both her and himself. It didn't matter what he thought. The way he had behaved towards Chris just some hours ago was horrible, and the boy had been near death, yet he hadn't spent a second thought on it. What kind of father was horrible enough to yell at his son just some hours before his death? And what kind of father would've chosen not to care when he noticed that his son was sick?

Leo knew it. No one was as bad a father as he was. And Piper was right, all this information at once was very hard to swallow. How could Chris be his son? How could he be dead?

Piper noticed the look on her husband's face and decided not to dig any further on what exactly had happened between the two just some hours ago. Apparently Leo was feeling bad enough about it, the way it was.

"What are we going to do when we find them?", she whispered. No one had thought about that question yet. They were looking for her older son, whose behavior was even another piece of information that she could hardly handle. But what were they supposed to do when they knew his whereabouts? It didn't change the fact that Chris was dead. Why were they even trying to find him? Somehow she needed to that and it seemed all natural to her, but on a logical level it made no sense.

"I don't know", Leo admitted.

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"And what the hell are you going to do now?", Phenola yelled at her older cousin.

The two of them were standing in some abandoned Underworld cave Wyatt had apparently chosen suitable for whatever he was intending to do.

"Resurrect him, what do you think?", he snapped back.

"And how will you do that? It's impossible to resurrect the dead, it didn't even work with that potion of yours! Chris wanted to die in piece, so stop it now. It's useless", she yelled, while doing her best to mask her sobs.

"So what? I'm the twice blessed one, nothing is impossible for me. I'll find a way, no matter what", Wyatt shouted, well aware of the fact that there were indeed things that were impossible, even for him. But he wasn't going to give up. That was not his habit and never would be. And besides he couldn't stand the mere thought that his younger brother could be anything but alive. Wyatt would not accept his death, at least not this easily.

"Maybe I can help…", a voice said from behind, startling both Halliwells. They turned around to see a stranger hidden in the shadows…

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TBC Please review!