Thanks for Making Me…

Disclaimer: I don't own Charmed or the lyrics used for the title of this story.

Summary: So, I have the layout (outline) of the story all ready to be written. Sorry if I confused any of you in the last chapter or it seemed like it was moving too quickly. I really just wanted to jump in and get us all wet. Sorry if I proverbially drenched a few of you who wanted to test the waters fist. Geeze, I'm rambling. The Charmed Ones will be in this chapter and Cole… er, Gabriel. You know who I meant. xD Yeah, I don't know if in this one Coop and Phoebe should be married or not since it is pretty much a divergence from after Cole saves Piper (Season 7). Tell me what you think on the subject, please.

Song to listen to (if you want, I might be off my rocker): "It's not Over"- Daughtry or for the more classical (instrumental) of you out there: "Duel" by Bond

Into the Rabbit Hole (AGAIN!)

Azure orbs, the color of the storm, which was spraying tiny iridescent drops of rain over him, blinked absently from their position in a handsome face, and a sense of contentment exuded from the being in question with faultless lips open and willing to allow air to flow from them. It was a handsome creature that stood, a vengeful angel, towering over the people and bustle of the Californian city of San Francisco. It was the face of an angel that watched the crowd, yet if one would look closely enough, they could see the fire of a demon burning within him, distorted and tainted beneath a mask of emotionless void. Like looking at a flickering bonfire across the Grand Canyon.

"I can't believe they talked me into this," emotionless calm was spread over his face, which spoke of an objective world view. It had been three years; three very long years since the Alterians had made their call, and it had been three years since he had held any semblance of feelings inside of himself. The dark and angry hatred and passionately burning fire of love had all but vanished from his person. It had been three years, and three years had made their difference. It had sharpened his mind (the removal of the pain and anger) with such a terrifying clarity; he had to wonder how he could have lived with it before. "The Charmed ones. Of all the people in the entire world, it had to be the Charmed Ones." A small flickering white soul moved around his face, shining and moving worriedly at how he seemed even slightly agitated.

Unfortunately, the three years had done little to dull the potency of the memories, of how much they HAD the ability to hurt him, even if the pain from them was gone. The being known as Gabriel, or once Cole Turner (he preferred the latter of the two), felt no pain from them, but the Alterian's promises of an emotionless nothingness had disappeared the moment they informed him that the highest echelon of Alterians were not suited to not having emotions.

Because in order to exact the perfect amount of justice, there had to be some remorse in actions and words.

Absently, perfectly downy white wings, the very epitome of light and innocence, flicked off rolling drops of water, their long, flowing elegance folding with a snapping "whoosh" behind broad shoulders. White wings, the sign of cherubs and seraphs, the angelic host, were what adorned the newly made Alterian's back, their feathers glossy and horrifyingly perfect against the backdrop of a rocky crag.

That too was something that was different than your average Alterian. White wings were rare. No, they were beyond rare, white wings signified something… well, something. Cole really didn't take the time to delve into it further. Not with the prospect of new charges had called his attention almost immediately. A small smirk slowly marched across Cole's face, and strong arms folded on a broad chest.

"And they knew," small wings on the side of his head flipping absently at the rain drops, keeping them from falling into his eyes. A slightly hissing noise drew his attention for barely a moment to the small girl's soul, the silvery substance settling around his neck in a contented sigh. "They knew that I was going to have to watch over the Charmed Ones the moment I said 'yes' to helping them." They lied. Cole shuffled from foot to foot, eyes scanning the horizon for what seemed like the umpteenth time that day. "And so they send me here, telling me that something is going to happen; and that there is going to be a storm to make sure that humans don't see anything that they aren't supposed to." It was like being an Avatar all over again, pretentious people in charge of you. He hated it.

Which surprised him. Hate wasn't in the emotions that he was "allowed" to feel, of which the list was very, very short. Righteous fury, a tinge of happiness, and then an over ruling sense of calm. Those were the emotions that he was allowed to feel, and hatred was most definitely not one of those.

Still, it was a nice change from the static learning and knowledge that had been forcibly crammed into his mind with each passing day when he had painstakingly gained control over his new body and powers. It was nice to feel something besides what the Alterians deemed worthy, and he relished every minute of it. Even if it lasted for a few moments in time before the emotionless training kicked back in, it was nice to break the mold every once in a while.

Normally, when things were going well, it was better not to say "it sure is going well." Every person (magical or not) knew that, but Paige would have liked to have given her sister Phoebe a crash course in it anyways. After all, Phoebe was the person that had made a remark like that earlier this morning, and since that was the case, she was the reason they were sitting here brewing potions and coming up with rhyming spells. As soon as those words had been uttered, the middle Charmed One had been thrown into a premonition. And that premonition had been a very, very frightening one.

"I don't see why you had to say it," Piper was sitting beside her, bouncing a chattering Wyatt on her lap. "Whenever anyone says that 'nothing can go wrong' or 'man, things sure are quiet' something BIG always happens to go wrong."

"I was just remarking on something that I saw," Phoebe mentioned, reading glasses perched on the end of her dainty nose, lips pressed into a frown as she looked at her sister. "How was I supposed to know that there would actually be several demons waiting for us to say something like that?" Of course it was time for something to go wrong, after the close to seven months without the slightest blip on the demon radar, there should have been some sort of warning to the sisters. Things that were normally silent for a very long time proved to be a very bad thing. They meant the Underworld was scheming.

"But if I remarked on everything that I always saw," Paige quipped from her position over a boiling cauldron, "I wouldn't have very many friends or have Henry, now would I?" A small puff of smoke filled the room, slowly choking her senses, and dainty hands swatted at the black plume without any real effect.

"I'd be you friend," Wyatt remarked seriously, slipping from his mother's lap and embracing the bare legs of his Aunty Paige, his small cherubic face contorted into a minute grimace at the smell engulfing the both of them.

"Oh, I know you would, honey," The witch slowly dipped down, giving her nephew an endearing squeeze around the shoulder. "But I was just trying to tell your Aunt Phoebe that she shouldn't go around complaining about the quiet. Not when she has no excuse to."

"I was just saying," The middle sister tried again, swallowing the rest of the words before they could be issued for fear the glares the other two Halliwell witches were sending her direction. "It was unusually quiet that is all."

"And now, honey, we have a demon that we can't seem to pin down. He has been appearing and reappearing around in your premonitions, and you also said there was going to be a very good chance that something even more powerful is going to come around and kill him. I thought we always told you never to look a gift horse in the mouth!" Piper flipped absently through the pad of paper, eyes scanning over the yellowed pages to check rhyming scheme.

Mocha eyes closed slightly, the glasses slipping the rest of the way from Phoebe's nose, fingers rubbing the wispy ebony locks from a high forehead. They were right; she would be the first to admit that. Things had been unusually good for the family, no incidents with love lives, no innocence being picked off, and her love life had been going remarkably well (for her past track record with relationships), but still, there had been an overwhelming rain cloud on their parade, just waiting to burst with a torrent of bad luck.

That day seemed to be today.

"I still can't seem to find him in here," it was said with an undertone of murderous intent, Phoebe throwing the Halliwell Book of Shadows closed with a resounding, loud, and dusty thunk. Nothing at all had been in the book. Phoebe snorted in disgust, looking up at her older sister that was sitting beside her. Piper's eyebrows arched in mild confusion at her sister's outburst of anger at the book that had helped to save their butts on several different occasions.

"What do you mean you can't find him in there?" Paige asked, voiced muffled from the dishrag pressed to her face. "You said that you found the first demon without a hitch. You are saying that you can't find the second one?" Sure, the Book of Shadows was a bit incomplete, as it stood now, they were still adding to it, but the fact that there wasn't even an allusion to a demon in it was quite odd.

"They don't even have a f-," Phoebe stopped at the glare sent to her by Piper and a quizzical glance upward by Wyatt. The oldest Halliwell pulled her son against her chest, whispering something into his ear, which must have been a dismissal because he tottered rapidly from the room. It was all the incentive Phoebe needed to continue on her rant. "They don't even have a description of him in here. It is like we are facing a new race."

"I highly doubt it is a new race," Piper muttered as she ran fingers through her long chestnut locks. "There is barely a race out there not in the book, and I don't think the Underworld would send a race like the one you described out there. Not if this," A pencil waved in the general direction of the Book of Shadows, her gaze not leaving the spell before her. She grimaced, finally tearing her attention from the paper to fix her sister with a patented "older sibling" glare. "Azazel is a high enough level to attack us without help. I would have to say that whoever this is has their own agenda."

"But like you said," The dishrag flew in the general direction of the sink, Paige sliding next to Piper, flipping to the face of Azazel with a glare of annoyance. "It sounds like a new race, but demons generally don't have wings." Big white wings were classically a sign of divine intervention, not demonic plague. And even angels didn't have big white wings like the mysterious premonition person had. Leo and Paige were point and case of that.

"Maybe Leo would know something?" Large eyes glowered down at the book for a few moments, Phoebe's gaze tearing back up to her sisters. "I know that it isn't usually his specialty, demonology, but it is better than just SITTING here." Because in approximately one hour and fifteen minutes (she had caught a glimpse of the clock in her premonition), there were going to be two demons (one was still debatable), sitting in their backyard, intending to duke it out regardless of whether or not the Charmed Ones were there.

"Pheebs," Piper started, sighing in defeat before leaning her head back, the next words loud and obnoxious, nearly impossible for anyone to miss. Times like these made her wish that Leo was still a Whitelighter. You didn't have to yell obscenely loudly, and he could be there in seconds. "LEO! LEO WE NEED YOU!"

The small smirk that had been on plastered onto Paige's lips melted away instantly, replaced by a grimace as she clapped her hands over her ears in an attempt to keep the banshee yell from getting to her. It wasn't just Piper, she mused, that missed Leo being a Whitelighter, it was hard NOT to miss the old days when Piper insisted on bellowing to get her husband's attention.

A few curses later, and several loud noises that shook the house, a disgruntled Leo appeared in the door way, eyes glancing over each face of his once charges, looking for any sign of damage to their person in question. Close to three minutes later, after he was thoroughly satisfied that it was indeed just another false alarm; he allowed the rigid posture that he had kept to relax, sitting down beside Phoebe with a scowl at his wife.

"You scared me," he admitted after a while, voice chiding if not a bit condescending without a hint of anger laced in it. It was always like this. Leo would get scared, Piper would brush it off as nothing, and they would move on. "Haven't I told you before not to yell like that?"

"Sorry, honey," Piper's tone said that she was anything but, as was shown by her sudden jump in conversation. "But Phoebe needed your help finding out who the demon in her premonition was. The Book of Shadows doesn't really seem to have much in it about him or his race." Two eye brows arched at this, the sandy haired male running a hand though his hair in an attempt to calm himself down from the rush of adrenaline that had accompanied his mad dash down the stairs.

"What makes you think that I could help you with this?" Leo asked, genuinely curious as to what could have THE Charmed Ones asking for his help. Generally demonology was left to those who really had to deal with it in everyday life. Not that he didn't have to, but without his Whitelighter abilities, he rather enjoyed his life away from the constant fear of coming too late to save the ones he loved.

"Well, you see," Phoebe began before letting out yet another exasperated sigh. "If you don't stop feeling so confused about it…" The hand stopped running through short sandy locks to be held up, palm forward in a sign of peace. Damn Empathy. "I just thought that you might know what this means." The pen was plucked from Piper's hands before being placed to the empath's own pad of paper, a few quick marks ensuing. Handing it over to the ex-Whitelighter, she placed the pen into her mouth only to have it grabbed back by Piper with a snort of revulsion at the drool on the tip.

"Are those wings?" The paper was turned around, upside down, side to side, anything to get a better idea of what the stick figure was trying to represent. Phoebe grunted disgustedly at the confusion rolling off her brother-in-law before tugging the paper back and turning it right side up. Honestly, her drawing wasn't THAT bad.

"Yes, yes they are," She tried to look offended at the implications that it could be anything OTHER than wings. "From what I could tell before Paige orbed the mask from him, he had two wings on his back, two wings on the side of his head, and I think there might have even been two wings on his legs. You know, what people think of when they think of Seraphim."

"Phoebe, I have seen Seraphim, and this doesn't look like a Seraph," Leo interjected, looking over the paper with interest. The fact of the matter was, regardless of whether or not Phoebe's drawing skills were any good; this figure didn't appear to belong to any class of angel he had ever seen before. And he had seen them all. "But I have seen something like this before, in some of the books in Magic School. There was a short little entry in a demonic book about these kinds of people." A triumphant look flashed across the empath's face.

"See, I told you that it was a demon," she informed her sisters, taking the yellow paper from Leo's yielding hands. "There was no way that something that powerful couldn't have an ulterior motive."

"He's not a demon," The rant was cut short, all the air deflating from her argument, a slight pout making itself comfortable on her face. "If what you saw is real, he isn't even supposed to exist."

"Do you mind telling us what you are talking about?" Paige quipped, her own light brown eyes snapping from the position across from Leo. She was tired of being ignored in this conversation. "Because I sure would like to know what you mean by the fact that he isn't supposed to exist, and yet she saw him plain as day."

"I am not saying that Phoebe is wrong," he held his hands out again in a call for peace. "I am just saying that it is really odd that one would be here of all places." Blue eyes caught the glare of his wife before he quickly reiterated his statement. "By all accounts, the Avatars, when I was one of them, told me that the race of Alterians were long gone. That there weren't anymore left in any realm."

"Wait," Piper stopped the conversation, confusion writing itself on her face. "You said 'Alterian' as in THE 'Alterians' the once rulers of the magical realm. The impartial judges that first drew the lines of light and dark magic, THOSE Alterians?" Leo grimaced, nodding his head ruefully as the decibels of his wife slowly began to grow louder and louder and higher and higher. "You have got to be kidding me!"

"Well, it would explain how he was able to destroy a high level demon as quickly as Phoebe claimed, and it would also explain the wings on a human body. Not to mention, after the demon purge, some were said to have disappeared into Limbo without ever being recorded as vanquished." Leo winced at his wife's tone, glancing at the two other sisters for support.

"So he can be vanquished?" Normally, under certain circumstances, vanquishing someone would become a top priority when faced with the fact that they could kill you with the bat of a… er… wing. But that little fact didn't seem to take into account the person in question could be a force of good or in the very least an innocent. And if he was going to kill a demon, he had to be a force of good or a demon with the same intentions as the Charmed Ones at least. Leo shook his head at Phoebe's question.

"They aren't really vanquished; it is more like they cease to exist. But in order to do that, you have to have a specific type of poison that involves enough blood of innocence to wipe out half of the shore line and a touch of pure evil with unicorn horn. The poison is nearly impossible to find."

"So we just let him come in and roll over us?" The voice took on a tone of hysteria now, for the life that would be shattered if the Alterian chose to have concealed motives. "We just let him have his way with out family and then let him walk all over the world with that sort of power?"

"No," Leo shook his head, a strong hand gripping his wife's shoulder and squeezing gently. "If he is going to be here, then it means that he is here to protect someone. And I have a feeling it is a force of good if he is killing off demons. As ultimate keeper of the balance, there has to be a reason why good is being protected. Think about it."

Five minutes.

In exactly five minutes he would be in the Charmed One's backyard, wings out stretched as pure magic would race through his veins. In five minutes, he would freefall in a perfect synchronization of magic and sheer power. In five minutes, he would stop referring to himself as Cole and would have to start using the name Gabriel, which he hated more than having to be in charge of the Halliwell's well being. Because leaving his name behind, that truly meant there was no going back. It meant he was so thoroughly lost in the new world that there was no way to be saved.

His consideration turned, the small, shining, and colorless soul flitting around his face, following him like a comet streaking across the sky. It was odd that it was still around and actually able to be in the human world with him. Normally, souls were not allowed onto the plane of the living. Then again, Alterians always were known to bend the rules of time and space, which was why Cole was able to be in the living realm in the first place.

"I still can't believe it," His fingers trailed down the nape of his neck, finding the odd parody of a mask around his neck, ready to be used to hide the face of Cole Turner from the world. "That it all leads back to this. Cycles are so overrated, didn't anyone tell them that?" If it could have laughed, he was sure the small little creature that had taken to following him would have. It would have been a pealing laughter, like little bells. However, the thought, no matter how cute and nice it was to normal people, didn't cause a smile to appear on his face.

Instead, the ribbon ties of the mask slipped through his fingers, the clothe fitting over his face securely. It was sort of stupid to have something on his face. The Charmed Ones weren't stupid, and with Paige's powers, it was certain that "Gabriel" would be unmasked the moment they didn't trust him.

Which would be as soon as he landed in their back yard.

Blue pools sparked with some unnamed emotion beneath the swath of plastic and silken ribbon. They weren't going to trust him, regardless of whether or not he was wearing a mask, and he couldn't care less. A smirk slowly quirked the side of his lips. They wouldn't trust him, but unlike before, the deep feeling of resentment did not manage to distort his clarity. The heartbreak at knowing that he was never going to be deserving of their trust no longer wove through him with a crippling agony. No longer did pain keep his mind from sharpness.

The wings beat again, wind whipping though them, dragging and fluttering them about in an odd dance.

Five minutes. In five minutes his new life would TRULY start, and he would jump back into the world of the Charmed Ones in a place of prominence. What fun he would have.

Really.

All right, just some more talk. Yay, right… I know you all like talk. So please review. Next chapter, we are going to put two and three tomorrow. Yeah, Cole and the Charmed Ones are actually going to MEET! lol. Sorry that this one was boring… And I don't know if Leo's eyes are blue or not, just roll with me here, people. I am sorry, my brain was just in the middle of a fart.

Anyways, REVIEW!!!!!!!!!!

Oh and sorry if I confused you…