Disclaimer: I don't own Charmed.
Cry in Shades of Gray
Her world began in March of 1978 under the dining room table.
She remembered things from before then; fleeting moments of glee or embarrassment or grief. But her life as it might have been ended that dreary March and reminiscing would never bring the possibilities back. Nine years later, as summer approached, Prue felt for the first time the suffocating burden she'd unwittingly placed on herself the moment she crawled under the table.
The day they buried her mother, the world was gray and flat. Prue sat staring out of the car window up at a sky that stretched out infinitely, a solid sheet of dull-colored rock. This was one of the few things she remembered about that day. The actual funeral, the drive back to their house, the mourners and condolences and sympathetic looks: all of this faded into the background of her mind. She imagined it time and again, but would be hard-pressed to recall the actual details. The dining room table, however, stayed with her a lifetime.
Prue knew that the adults must have fawned over Phoebe, only two at the time, but at some point her youngest sister ended up in her arms. Really, Phoebe had been too big for seven-year-old Prue to carry, but in some surge of strength, in some unwillingness to give her sister back to the arms of strangers, Prue wrapped Phoebe's legs around her waist and carried her like a mother monkey would her baby at the zoo. Piper, who spent the day meandering between Prue and Grams, stood by her side then and looked at her with doleful eyes. No more, they said. Phoebe's tired head against her shoulder. No more.
She led them to the dining room table. Someone had laid a slat-gray tablecloth across the top, creating the perfect cover. Wordlessly, Piper crawled under, followed by Prue and Phoebe. Prue didn't know how long they sat there, Phoebe sleeping in her lap, Piper snuggling into her side. All she did know was that by the time Grams lifted the tablecloth and said, Let's get out of here, girls, a strain of possessiveness over her sisters had coursed through her. They were hers to protect; hers to comfort; hers to love. No one, ever, would take that away.
She'd been cursed—blessed?—ever since. On the way to the beach after Grams found them under the table. As Piper refused to leave the house and go to first grade. When their father left and never came back. The day Phoebe asked, Why don't we have a mother? Every single day for nine years she'd been the shoulder they cried on and the wall they stood behind. She was exhausted.
That was why, she supposed, that she began to collect the pamphlets.
When she was fourteen she went to her first college fair. She and Andy had tagged along with his older brother and spent most of the fair collecting brochures from schools as far away from San Francisco as they could. They'd laughed about it then, thinking of Kansas City or Scranton or Ann Arbor and trying to picture themselves there. At home that night, though, Prue had gingerly set them into an old cigar box she'd gotten long ago in a time she couldn't remember well. Then the box went under her bed, out of view from the rest of the world.
In two years she'd collected grand amount of college paraphernalia. Some days she'd lock herself in her room and lay it across her floor to examine all the possibilities life held. She let herself forget that her life had been created for her years ago and that there was no escape. And it was nice to escape into fantasy for awhile. To unremember the day under the dining room table and the promises it held.
When the real world inevitably crept back in, she would sweep the evidence back into hiding and remind herself that she was merely pretending. She'd laugh like she and Andy had two years ago and pretend it was a joke. She told herself that it meant nothing—that it had to mean nothing.
And sometimes at night she whispered the same thing as she cried herself to sleep, tears seeping into her white pillow and creating spots of gray.